Nina

It's women's history month and that means we get to dive into the lives of women who were so good they were too bad to make it into our history books. Here's to being a phenomenal woman. (Part 3/4)

Surely you know Nina – one of the most extraordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American music, a consummate musical storyteller with a remarkable talent and legacy for love, liberation, and empowerment through her work.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933, the sixth of eight children in a poor North Carolina family, music took Nina from poverty to fame. She began playing the piano at age two desiring to be the first black concert pianist, but spent some time playing music in jazz nightclubs to support herself, and ultimately became a world renowned classical jazz star. She caught the attention of record companies at twenty-four, and in 1954 Nina Simone was born.

Her life was both extraordinary and extraordinarily complicated. She lived everywhere and nowhere – the US, Barbados, Switzerland, Liberia and ended her days in France. There are so many stories about Nina that show there were two sides to this beauty – light and dark.

She was as smart and witty as she was temperamental and moody. She suffered great segregation and racism throughout her life. She once evaded taxes in protest of the war in Vietnam. She endured abusive marriages. She once pulled a gun on a record label executive that refused to pay her outstanding money. She once fired a buckshot over her neighbour's garden to make their teenage son quiet down. She once went broke and had to sell off her jewelry and furniture to make ends meet. She was labeled a diva from her raging outbursts. She battled a pill addition at the height of her fame. She advocated for civil rights. And probably most beautifully, she wrote, produced and performed some the most prolific civil rights songs in the 60s.

The 60s were the global rise of Black consciousness – along with US civil rights movements, Caribbean colonies broke away from Britain and sprung into independence. Anti-apartheid activists movements in South Africa took center-stage. And Nina used her music to bring a sound to the protests engulfing her world. She brought raw feeling to the collective sentiment.

5 Nina Simone civil rights songs to listen to...

(1) Mississippi Goddamn
(2) To Be Young, Gifted and Black
(3) Images
(4) Four Women
(5) I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free

Nina's civil rights songs were a movement of their own, proving that the voice is a transcendental tool – and in this case a tool to make political statements people are influenced by. Not only are her songs uplifting but they are an unapologetic demand for revolutionary action.

What is most intriguing is how you can hear the weightiness of life in her voice. And even in moments of humour or speaking of love there is a definitive certainty of someone who has grieved, and pained and fought, and struggled because of her insistent meraki. That is to say, she put herself into the work, and she left a little bit of her soul in every lyric she wrote or sang – and her soul was heavy, burdened and crying to be free.

It wasn't until her later years in the 1980s that her friend was able to diagnose her as bipolar, bringing clarity to her violent mood swings and diva like behaviour. She brought with her wits and talent the highest highs and the lowest lows. Perhaps Nina just wanted to feel good about something in her life. She felt it all – the burden of brilliance and the torture of talent, and nonetheless, she went until the end, being her full self, performing her final days in France, dying peacefully in her sleep from a battle with breast cancer.

This week I want you to consider how you are shaped by your origins and how you express this in the present.

(1) I wonder if you feel burdened by where you come from and the expectations that may or may not have been placed on you?

(2) Do you leave a bit of your soul in all that you do, or is life a series of motions?

(3) What makes you feel good and when do you feel free?

----
'til next Sunday!
Z.