Crying in the Club, Take 1

Some notes on Nina Simone singing spirituals at home on secret rehearsal tapes, and a new music biography book club I'm launching, beginning with her autobiography.

Benediction,

Nina Simone didn’t intend to become an interpreter of sentimental love songs or any song lyrics, when she took a job at a local piano bar to earn some extra money to send home to North Carolina during her time studying at Curtis Institute of Music in Philly, but the owner of the club informed her on the first night that she’d better sing, this wasn’t a classical piano gig. Thus marks the humble and halting beginning of her life in show business, her shock into divaism.

Local students “discovered” Ms. Simone (née Eunice Waymon) there, and in the eternal wake of that buzz, she would never escape her tenure as a so-called jazz vocalist and entertainer, though her intention had been to spend her life as a classical pianist. Her voice was just too enthralling and uncanny in its androgyny and depth; news of it spread like a salacious rumor and the size of the crowds exceeded the capacity of her casual gigs until she was performing her haunted-maudlin versions of “I Loves You Porgy” (her breakthrough hit), on late-night television, where the American imagination goes to be programmed and held hostage in diversions and directions to anything meaningful or popular.

The protest songs, like “Mississippi Goddamn!,” would come later ,and the bridge between them would be folk originals that bordered the hymnal like “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” a song in prayer formation, a necessary alternative to standards like “Amazing Grace” with similar desperations or agendas— a tormented soul seeks mild-mannered redemption by performing and absolving that anguish, giving it to us, as if giving it to God. Give me a clear mind, give me the words to say just what I mean, now… Nina improvises during a live version, the best version, because she steals the rehearsed prayer back to expand it the way a preacher might interpolate a line of scripture during an expository sermon. She captures the echo, the agency, which the original lyrics excise with the disembodied mechanics of the folk form. Instead of the ‘wretch (ed),’ groomed into polite dismay, she is the sharp warning that once her mind is resolved and steadied, her fortune and favor will be undeniable, she will transcend her role as a black entertainer and become oracular and dangerous, reaching her potential as a healer and thinker, a poet.

To avoid being misunderstood she would need the precision of fallen angels longing to climb back into seraphic light, she would have to be determined to not misunderstand, or glamor herself with desires imposed by the external world. With that in mind, the protest songs were written, which she later accuses of ruining her career, making her an abandoned living martyr and relic to the Civil Rights Era, both revolutionary and romantic in temperament but incapable of fully realizing either tendency as they negate one another and scatter her audiences and impulses across clashing ideologies. Black power was not what the attentive hip white college students at her early gigs were there to consider, they coveted her singular stylizations of jazz standards in folk and Appalachian blues forms, her ability to be guttural and spectral in the same line, caustic and soothing, and the brutal restraint that duality requires—the voice of a muted trumpet or a wounded swan coming from a woman who promises she would have been on the frontlines with a machine gun if her husband had condoned it; the anomaly where rage and tenderness meet and are in perfect harmony in her one soul. In that way, her only counterparts in American music are Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In literature, James Baldwin, Baraka, Toni Morrison. To sing both tones, you have to live them, both with abandon. The reward is that no one can reach you as you’re trapped and maneuvering between extreme beauty and utter terror, you’re almost free but the price is good company.

Nina’s alienation preyed on her, bullied her some. In her often-unanswered letters to Jimmy, as she called James Baldwin she’d beg for a note or phone call, recount confusions about her comeback, divulge abject loneliness and psychic shipwreck, or delightfully recount wearing a scarf he’d given her during a series of performances, just to be in his company, or the silken approximation of his embrace. From backstage, public life was a menace, a distraction from personal evolution she both needed and resented. A couple weeks ago, like unanticipated gift from the Gods of seance, a series of Nina Simone’s at-home recordings of hymns and spirituals appeared on my endless scroll, my trusted algorithm, my Genevieve (as I’ve named the imaginary spy assigned to me as my alter-ego to invade my digital privacy with fragments of everything I love popping up as I am focused on doing what I love).

These are unreleased and un-remastered takes of Nina and piano, and they are so gorgeous in their doomed faith in the faithless, I felt like I was performing an illegal heist on the first listen, like I’d found a portal where Nina Simone’s several lives we lived in unison, a collapsed quantum field for rejoicing in. This root network of salve songs carried all over the world for their medicinal qualities and whisper-sung as lullabies to herself in her secret (until now) living room sessions, should not have found me so ready to announce it and pray with it. The spirituals are the first protest songs, they place liturgy in solidarity with the blues and adulterate the Christian sensibility with hopelessness—no hope for reprieve in heaven just pure-hearted oblivion here and now, now and forever, and maybe the promised land they use to seduce you into the afterlife when your body can no longer be purposed as capital is bypassed by surrender to being blighted here and you sing to spirits of pure unmitigated fatalism, Oh, the blood, oh the blood, oh the blood done changed my name. At home, rehearsing for a concert that is meant to be secular you ruminate on crucifixion, jubilant about the prophetic bloodshed that made old time religion’s most sacred myth as vivid and enduring as it is.

In Nina Simone’s interpretation of the pillaging of Jesus, you can hear murmurs and anticipation of her own. She also never intended to go under judgment for our sins, but what is a life spent on stages attempting to romanticize oppression or overcome sentimentality with militancy other than martyrdom? Did she not buckle on on that crossroads for us and trade dreams with the devil for us? Is it not a miracle that she had this time at home to rehearse that calamity, and used that time to shift from the known ballads and standards to Psalm 23 and piano, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me, thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies/anoint my head with oil so I can see… (she riffs an extra line), and from it slips into openly wishing for Lyndon Johnson’s victory, or there is one thing I know, Jesus loves me for sure…he has riches, never been taught, what a blessing in my Jesus, I’ve found, then into a percussive version of “Oh Happy Day.”

This is now my favorite Nina Simone recording because it is just for her, she’s praising the owl in her isolated corner between divinity and scrutiny and as unnatural as it is for the human being to be worshipped, this is her cross to bear, she cannot abscond it, so she does need Jesus, she did need the blood of the new name to cover her. She knows that with that worship of her public identity, betrayal is inevitable. She will be left for dead way up on that pedestal where we mount and discard our idols. I am at home alone singing for her now, against the curse of being worshiped, hoping to be saved by her voice. The dignity of the rehearsal tape will one day be all we have of those who we call the greats, having cannibalized every unpaid and paid gig and archival records and session for the market, until we hear voice’s like Nina Simone’s and think of car commercials and imitation house music to be played at hotels in Miami, and we’ll have to find a way to disavow our heroes and send them home to be with their Gods. She was so eager for that release, her lament becomes compulsory, the penance she’s willing to pay to be left alone: It’s all over y’all, no more crying, ain’t too much more crying no more, ain’t too much dying no more, the happy days are free—

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I’m starting a bi-monthly biography book club, beginning with Nina Simone’s autobiography I Put A Spell on You. We’ll meet in a month on April 20th for a live session open to all paid subscribers where we’ll discuss the book and listen to this and other recordings. I’ve attached a copy of the book here. Future books in the series will be attached to paid posts but I hope many will read Nina in her own words as she’s been mistranslated and appropriated so casually through the years, starting with her very first gig in Philly.

I Put A Spell On You, The Autobiography Of Nina Simone

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