Podcasts · Episode

Nina Simone and Taking the Politics of Black Culture Seriously

Program: Power Play
Aired: Tuesday, June 23, 2020
Hosted by Ross Hickman · Karbo

In this episode, Ross and Karbo take a look at Nina Simone’s participation in the ‘politics’ of her time—and not only the Civil Rights or Black Power movements but the broader politics of Black identity in the mid-century. How long until all Americans can take Simone’s political voice seriously?

Heard on this Episode:

Imagination by Yakov Goldman

Mississippi Goddam by Nina Simone

The Well Tempered Clavier by Bach and performed by Raymond Smullyan

Four Women by Nina Simone

Ladies of the Damned by John Vallis

In Former Rings by Unheard Music Concepts 

Dakota by Unheard Music Concepts

Transcript

[Imagination, performed by Yakov Goldman, plays]

Ross: Welcome back to Power Play. 

Karbo: Throughout this season we’re bringing you stories about the power of music, the music of the powerful, music as a means to power, and what happens when music and power go head to head.

Ross: I’m Ross.

Karbo: And I’m Karbo. 

Ross: Let’s get to it. 

Karbo: Consider for a moment all of the performances Carnegie Hall has hosted in its long history—perfectly polished pianists and sparkling singers filling this bastion of music with notes and voices. Audiences sitting comfortably in the plush red chairs, gazing up at the gilded stage, ears tuned to the minute orchestrations of fingers on keys and air pressing along vocal chords. 

Ross: Carnegie Hall truly was the performance venue for any aspiring or established musician in the United States. But, like many of the institutions of ‘high culture’ in New York and the United States, Carnegie Hall catered primarily to white patrons and white performers. Still, the performance hall has a history of offering the stage to performers of color. 

Karbo: In 1893, soprano Sissieretta Jones became the first Black person to perform at Carnegie Hall, which was founded by Andrew Carnegie three years earlier in 1890. The hall also gave the stage to Black intellectuals like Booker T. Washington—the educator, author, and civic leader who had a central voice in Black American intellectual life around the turn of the twentieth century. Washington made a particularly memorable appearance with Samuel Clemens, or Mark Twain, at Carnegie Hall in 1906 at a benefit for the Tuskegee Institute. 

Ross: Some of the first jazz music ever performed in the United States took place in Carnegie Hall in 1912, when Black jazz musician James Reese Europe and his Clef Club Orchestra performed what they billed a “Concert of Negro Music.” Europe was, according to Black composer and lyricist Eubie Black, the “Martin Luther King of music” for his influence on the development of jazz styles in the early twentieth century. 

Karbo: Other Black artists and activists like Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Marcus Garvey, Fats Waller, Ella Fitzgerald, and Duke Ellington, routinely appeared on stage, spanning decades of performances and speeches in the first half of the twentieth century. Most prominently and frequently, contralto singer Marian Anderson performed at Carnegie Hall 50 times over 70 years—the most any performer has ever appeared at the hall. 

Ross: All of this is to say, Carnegie Hall has a very long, very storied, history with Black artists and activists. The relationship between a Black artist and their audience was nearly always punctuated by the fact that audiences at Carnegie Hall were overwhelmingly white. Despite the general racial stratification of the Hall’s audiences, Black people did attend a wide range of concerts and other events at Carnegie Hall and some of these events remained unsegregated. 

Karbo: Still, the audiences were reliably majority-white, filled mostly with white New Yorkers interested in staying up-to-date with ‘culture.’ On one evening in 1964, Nina Simone, a rising star in music who bridged jazz, classical, blues and other styles throughout her career, sang what was one of the most controversial concerts ever performed at Carnegie Hall. In front of an audience filled with white people, Simone belted “Mississippi Goddam”—what she facetiously called a ‘show tune’—with lyrics like, “Oh, but this whole country is full of lies. You’re all gonna die, and die like flies.”

[Mississippi Goddam, as performed by Nina Simone live from Carnegie Hall, plays]

Ross: “Mississippi Goddam” was Nina Simone’s impassioned response to the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15th, 1963—an act of white terror that killed four young Black girls who were leaving a Bible class. Though she initially considered reacting violently to the attack, by going into her garage to make a gun “to go out and kill someone… [she] could identify as being in the way of [her] people,” Simone decided instead to put her anger into song. 

Karbo: And that she did. In the course of an hour, Simone penned the lyrics for “Mississippi Goddam,” a stinging mockery of any attempt to feign ignorance at the injustices against Black people that Americans witnessed so frequently. Simone took particular aim at insults white people and politicians had flung at Black people over the decades (and, indeed, centuries) that Black people had pushed for rights in the United States. Accusations of being too “lazy,” “crazy,” or simply “rotten” to deserve full civil rights, to merit meaningful recognition of Black history, and to join in efforts to bring about equity between white and Black people. 

Ross: Unlike other ‘civil rights’ anthems like Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome” and Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” spoke more specifically and directly to the concerns of Black people, confronting the American government’s unfulfilled promises of “desegregation” and chiding Americans more broadly for not living up to the demands of “mass participation” in anti-racist political activism. 

Karbo: But Nina Simone understood what many white legislators may not have been able to grasp—that to truly revolutionize America, the Civil Rights movement had not only to change the laws of the land but also, and perhaps more so, the cultural narratives that brought about the laws in the first place. In the struggles for legal protections for voting in elections and attending integrated schools, white government leaders weren’t taking culture seriously enough. 

Ross: Yeah, this really was the revolution in music as well—music in Simone’s lifetime more visibly and audibly transitioned from being an entirely local affair, in elite locales like Carnegie Hall, to being popularized in recordings that people could purchase and play in their homes, to being performed in large clubs and concerts, to being broadcast over the radio. Nina Simone witnessed and participated in the many theatres of popular music’s development over the course of the twentieth century—especially the eventual utilization of popular music for explicitly political ends. 

Karbo: It was a long road that brought Simone to singing “Mississippi Goddam” at Carnegie Hall in 1964. From nearly the beginning of her life, Simone had demonstrated an exceptional innate talent for listening to and reproducing music—a remarkable ability to pick up pitches and carry notes when singing in her family’s church in Tryon, North Carolina.

Ross: Tryon was at the time a small Black community, nestled at the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains in southwestern North Carolina. Nina Simone was actually born Eunice Waymon, to her parents John and Kate Waymon. Some of Simone’s earliest memories were of her mother, singing hymns, filling the house and the church with religious tunes. Simone had such a proclivity and dexterity with music and musical instruments that, at 2 ½, Simone climbed up onto the bench in front of the church’s organ and played “God Be with You Till We Meet Again” all the way through. 

Karbo: Simone’s mother Kate was a Methodist preacher, and she’d often have Simone play for church services—even though Simone’s legs couldn’t even reach the pedals yet. Rev. Waymon also cleaned a white household for extra money. At the same time, Simone witnessed the voice of a strong Black woman, booming with conviction at the pulpit every Sunday, while also doubtless being aware of her mother’s other job—watching her mother work for a white woman and fitting the Black woman into the neat image of the typical domestic ‘help.’

Ross: The white woman Rev. Waymon worked for offered to pay for Simone’s piano lessons with a local teacher named Muriel Mazzanovich—a British-born lover of classical music, especially Bach. Before long, Miz Mazzy, as Simone called her, had imbued in Simone an adoration for Bach, and Simone acquired a tall ambition—to become a great pianist, to join the ranks of the likes of Bach himself. 

[The Well Tempered Cavalier by Bach and performed by Raymoncd Smullyan, plays]

Karbo: But, from the start, Simone, Miz Mazzy, and her family were reminded just how difficult the road ahead was. To be a Black woman in classical music in the 1930s was one hurdle itself, but to be a successful Black woman in the world of classical music was quite another, far more challenging, prospect. One particular event shattered any illusions Simone and her circle might have had about the place of Black people in this new world. 

Ross: In what was perhaps Simone’s first confrontation with an audience, before a recital at a library in Tryon, Simone grew incensed when her parents were removed from their seats in the front row to make room for a white couple. Simone refused to start her program and got up, calmly demanding that her parents had to be moved back before she would begin playing. People laughed at her audacity, but then they took her seriously—her parents were eventually returned to their places at the front. 

Karbo: But, the embarrassment and visibility of the whole situation sat with Simone and her family for decades. As Simone continued her education and kept playing music, this first interaction between audience, and prejudice, and the standards and hierarchies of classical music performance, kept reverberating in her mind. 

Ross: Many years later in her memoir, Simone remembers feeling the day after the recital “as if [she] had been flayed, and every slight, real or imagined, cut [her] raw. But, the skin grew back a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black.” Like many Black girls, though each in unique situations, Simone’s experiences of setbacks and jaded expectations of her abilities forced her out of childhood into a harsh, imposed maturity—legitimizing the intensity and vitriol of criticism and rejection she began to receive early on and would continue to deal with for the rest of her life. 

Karbo: Simone had to contend with the full onslaught of cultural stereotypes and images of Black womanhood that pervaded American culture—and still do. Tempering one’s anger and resenting one’s supposed ‘ugliness’ were central in Simone’s experience as a Black woman in American music culture. Even at the height of her success, Simone was criticized, in both Black and white media outlets, for her angry outbursts at concerts. 

Ross: And her physical appearance was always of concern. Even when some select measures of racial equity were achieved, it was still so largely a man’s world that Simone grew up and lived in. The aesthetics of beauty that America prized—built fundamentally on the white male’s approval of the white woman’s variously sized body, straight hair, and white skin—left Simone an object of opposition to whatever white beauty standards happen to be. Her dark skin, her face, her natural hair—these set her apart from the economies of beauty and sex that white people had organized and maintained for centuries. 

Karbo: ‘Beauty’—what some scholars like Tressie McMillan Cottom and others call ‘big Beauty,’ meaning it has a capital ‘B’—has complex manifestations and oppressions for Black women. In her chilling ballad “Four Women,” Nina Simone tells the ‘stories’ of four Black women, whose bodies have different racialized aesthetics of female Blackness. 

[Four Women, as performed by Nina Simone, plays]

Ross: In perhaps a more familiar term, Simone addresses Black colorism here—a particular type of internalized racial prejudice that pits light-skinned people against dark-skinned people. Since lighter skin is more associated with whiteness and (capital B) Beauty, Black people with lighter skin can look down upon Black people with darker skin, buying into the white cultural lie that darker skin isn’t beautiful. And Black people with darker skin can claim that Black people with lighter skin have less of a claim to Black identity, potentially trying to separate them from their Black identities and experiences.

Karbo: One of the ends of colorism, which is part of white systems of racism, is to divide Black people, making lighter- or darker-skinned Black people more concerned with the hue of their skin than the relentless and oppressive cultural forces of whiteness that are at play. This is not to say that colorist oppression does not exist—it does, and people with lighter skin can often use and enjoy their apparent privilege in complicated ways.

Ross: For Nina Simone, the “Four Women” of her song are complicated in their racialized aesthetics—one of them has “yellow skin” and the other “woolly hair.” But despite their differences in appearance, these women are Black not just because of how their hair looks, but because they have experienced the American culture and politics of racializing Black and white bodies, and supporting racism against Black ones.

Karbo: These women—Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches—carry the pains of punishment, sexual violence, hypersexualization, and slavery in their bodies. Bodies that differ in appearance and experience, but bodies that represent some of the oppressions that Black women have faced and continue to face in the United States. 

Ross: Experiences of racism and colorism are of course gendered, which “Four Women” highlights. Though Black men have also faced (and continue to face) oppressions similar to Black women, Simone is centering in “Four Women” the histories and present struggles of Black women in her own cultural and political climate—in which Black women faced the doubled prejudices of racism and misogyny. 

[Ladies of the Damned, by John Vallis, plays]

Karbo: Simone herself contended with the American culture of Beauty that kept reminding her of how inferior, and indeed ugly, many people saw her to be. Simone knew that, “[she] can’t be white and [she’s] the kind of colored girl who looks like everything white people despise or have been taught to despise.” And just for context, Simone wrote that when she had already become famous; acclaim did not and does not, by any means, end racism and misogyny against Black performers. 

Ross: And Simone knew just how gendered the racist prejudices of Beauty can be: “if I were a boy, it wouldn’t matter so much, but I’m a girl and in front of the public all the time, wide open for them to jeer and approve of or disapprove of.” 

[Ladies of the Damned, by John Vallis, continues to play]

Karbo: The most important male influences in her life and career—besides, perhaps, her abiding appreciation for Bach—were her husband Andrew Stroud and her dearest friend James Baldwin, one of the most important writers and cultural critics of the twentieth century. Even though both of them were men, Black men, Stroud and Baldwin had very different ways of talking to and treating Simone. 

Ross: Stroud saw himself as Simone’s ultimate manager, the one who would keep her in line, when most people around her saw moments of pure chaos. Stroud was a sort of gatekeeper for Simone’s personal and professional lives, attempting to control everything from which gigs Simone would take at which clubs, all the way to how much alcohol Simone could drink. 

Karbo: Stroud, in Simone’s words, was “a light-skinned man,” who was “well built” and “very sure of himself.” Stroud put this masculine confidence and know-how to work, trying to tamp down Simone’s image into a calculated, professional performer rather than the impulsive, erratic presence that Simone more often channeled.

Ross: But in Stroud’s efforts to advance Simone’s career, Stroud also participated in trying to silence, or at least lower the volume, of Simone’s political activism on the stage. Perhaps harkening back to her first confrontation with an audience at her piano recital in Tryon, Simone routinely spoke to her audiences in provocative and sometimes damning ways—directly confronting their disrespect or ‘disinterest,’ as well as political issues that white audiences might not want to think about. 

Karbo: Sometimes Simone’s non-musical outbursts on stage could come from a place of paranoia, but she had good reason not to trust her audiences. In the 1960s, radio stations in New York and Philadelphia, as well as many other cities, banned “Mississippi Goddam” from the airwaves for its supposed obscenity. 

Ross: Even at Carnegie Hall, when Simone introduced “Mississippi Goddam,” the audience laughs—not taking Simone seriously enough to think that this Black woman could have something worthwhile to say about politics, much less Mississippi.

[Mississippi Goddam, as performed by Nina Simone, plays]

Karbo: Simone keeps speaking at various intervals in the song, interrupting lyrics that allude to slavery and persistent attempts by white people to trivialize the urgency of Black dignity. And Simone betrays a general distrust of the American public, not just the audience: “I don’t trust you anymore,” Simone sings, “you keep on sayin’ ‘Go slow.’”

Ross: Simone’s distrust of audiences sometimes even kept concerts from beginning or happening at all. Or, once a concert had started, Simone on several occasions would quickly shut it down, sensing from the audience a lack of respect for her work—that they ‘didn’t understand it.’

Karbo: The rise of Simone’s more active involvement in politics coincided with her growing frustrations with audiences. For her husband and manager Stroud, Simone was on stages for one thing—to perform, make a name for herself, and make money. But Simone, at times, had a different vision for her presence in American musical culture, a presence that never abandoned her more purely artful ambitions but also engaged more vocally the political and personal sides of her career. 

Ross: For some of the more ‘major’ political events of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, Simone was a bit of a distant observer, still focusing on her success as a professional singer. During the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, Simone was busy preparing for a club event that was difficult to pass up. But, Simone was doing her own anti-racist work that never got as much attention as the more obviously political activities of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements got. 

Karbo: Integrated concerts were, in the American South, shall we say a rare occasion. But at a concert sponsored by the N.A.A.C.P.  in Birmingham, Alabama—the first integrated concert in the Birmingham area—Simone performed in front of a mixed, but mostly Black, audience. Guards patrolled the area around the stadium, having to provide protection for such an event. Protection or not, the presence of armed white police officers was not a particularly welcome sight, given the history and contemporary reality of police violence against Black people. 

[In Former Rings, by Unheard Music Concepts, plays]

 Ross: Though she took part in this concert, Simone did receive criticism for her more limited roles in the most visible events of the Civil Rights movement. After hearing that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been arrested in Alabama the same day that Simone had given her first ever concert at Carnegie Hall, Simone’s friend Lorraine Hansberry—the acclaimed playwright whose A Raisin in the Sun remains one of the most important plays of the twentieth century—called Simone up to encourage her to get more involved in the more formal political cause. 

Karbo: Simone was very close to cultural figures like Hansberry, as well as James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. Simone certainly was part of the Black cultural bourgeoisie of the mid-twentieth century that still enjoys wide recognition today, though for lots of different reasons. But what was perhaps then left out of the picture somewhat, and still is today, is the political relevance of these Black writers and artists. 

Ross: Simone, Hansberry, Hughes, and Baldwin were, of course, fighting the assumption that Black people were culturally inferior. In one of his many essays, James Baldwin contended that in the middle of the twentieth century, many white people thought Black people were still culturally ‘silent.’ 

Karbo: But even when the dominant white culture did make efforts to recognize the contributions of Black artists and writers, the political gravity of their work often didn’t come across strongly, or didn’t translate at all into white conceptions of power and the political relevance of culture. 

Ross: Musical political activism from white people—think the folk protest singers of the ‘60s like Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary—often did attract large crowds and furthered tangible political action. Peter, Paul, and Mary performed a standard repertoire of folk protest music at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, in front of a crowd with Black and white engaged citizens and activists. 

Karbo: Nina Simone’s work, however, didn’t exactly receive the same level of public visibility. And even when it did, Simone ran into difficulties in trying to translate the messages of her music into political action.

Ross: Now, granted, Simone didn’t really enter into the major political theaters of the Civil Rights movement until the mid-1960s, and her musical career was not entirely focused on the kind of formal political activism that people might expect from ‘true’ protest singers. 

Karbo: Still—Simone’s work was political, just not in the ways that most people might have understood politics at the time. Simone centered the voices and experiences of Black women and the intricate and invisibilized politics of their identities.

Ross: Simone’s volatile and varied relationships to her audiences elucidate her mostly futile attempts to convince people of her political seriousness, at least in as widespread and public a way as other musical and political anti-racist activists. 

Karbo: In 1968, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., sometimes violent protests erupted in major cities across the United States. In Harlem a year later, Nina Simone performed “Four Women”—along with more overt political songs like “Revolution” and “Backlash Blues”—in front of an audience of mostly Black people. 

[A recording of the event plays]

 “Are you ready to smash white things? To burn buildings – are you ready? 

(cheers from audience)

Are you ready to build Black things?”

Ross: After her songs, Simone read from a new poem by Black poet David Nelson: “Are you ready, Black people?… Are you ready to do what is necessary?… Are you ready to kill if necessary?… Are you ready to smash white things, to burn buildings, are you ready?… Are you ready to build Black things?” 

Karbo: The crowd responded with half-hearted cheers and a subdued enthusiasm to Simone’s call to action. Simone was indeed trying to incite a violent protest or rebellion that day in Harlem, but she failed. She failed for what were likely many reasons, including the relative ‘peace’ that Harlem had enjoyed over the last three years while other cities burned and splintered, the exhaustion of activists after years and decades of only somewhat successful work, and the distractions that new political questions brought—especially the shift from Civil Rights activism to anti-war sentiment. 

Ross: But beyond all these reasons for the crowd not taking Simone seriously enough to take action, Simone’s own history with audiences failing to take her seriously rang true once again. White audiences would laugh at her brazenness, casing her assertiveness and intolerance for disrespect within another neat image of a hysterical and altogether ‘entertaining’ portraiture of an angry and ludicrous Black woman. For white audiences, unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to merely understand what Simone was communicating in her lyrics—lyrics that spoke truth to the larger systems of cultural power that denigrated her race and gender. 

Karbo: In the most visible and audible narratives of Civil Rights and anti-racist history, though, Simone’s is a mostly peripheral voice. And when it came to the dynamics between her and her audiences, Simone consciously understood what was happening to the public’s image and reception of her. 

Ross: And so, whether in front of a mostly white crowd at Carnegie Hall or in front of a mostly Black crowd in Harlem, Nina Simone just simply wasn’t ‘convincing’ enough for what some might call ‘real’ political action. But that is, to be sure, an oversimplification of Simone’s impact. There were surely many people who heard Simone’s voice, felt common cause with her music’s messages, and took action on small and large scales. We truly don’t want to gloss over how revered and celebrated Simone was by many in the Black American community; what was missing then, however, and what is missing today, is the careful, appreciative, nuanced engagement of Black culture and politics by white people. White people’s failure to listen to Black women was, of course, no fault of people like Nina Simone. But the political consequences of insulating whiteness from Black cultural and political influence and narratives? Those consequences are felt deeply and painfully today. 

Karbo: Recovering those narratives and assessing Simone’s impact requires, then, for each of us to engage her work, take it seriously, and consider what place it might have in our consciousnesses today. The political issues Simone addressed outlived her time and persist in our own, so reestablishing her voice in our current political music culture is not only a tribute to her legacy, but an attempt at fulfilling her desires to refashion American culture and politics to include the images of those left out of the picture for too long. 

[Dakota, by Unheard Music Concepts, plays]

Karbo: Hello, this is Karbo – creator, and editor of PowerPlay. Ross Hickman is my illustrious co-host. This episode was researched by Ross, and produced by Tamberly Ferguson. Thanks to Josh Sacco for audio engineering and indispensability. 

The music you heard today was Imagination by Yakov Goldman, Mississippi Goddam by Nina Simone, The Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach and performed by Ramone Simon Lion, Four Women by Nina Simone, Ladies of the Damned by John Valese and , finally, In Former Rings and a Dakota each by Unheard Music Concepts. Particular thanks to Black feminist scholars and activities, including Particia Hill Collins, Kimberle Crenshaw, Bell Hooks, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, for their parts in shaping the intersectional perspectives on and of Black women’s experiences. Their work is pivotal for getting to know Nina Simone. 

And finally, thank you, for listening. PowerPlay is presented by WDAV Classical Public Radio. If you like what you heard, you can find more information on this episode, and other great programming, at wdav.org/subscribe.

Playlist