‘Four Women’: Nina Simone’s direct empowerment of women of colour
Nina Simone had a voice unlike the world will ever hear again. There isn’t a singer out there who has the power to emote and convey beauty in the same way that Simone could. On songs such as ‘What More Can I Say?’ as she proclaims, “I would go anywhere, anywhere you go”, her mixture of love and sadness is unparalleled, to the point that no words will ever be able to do it justice.
It wasn’t just Nina Simone’s voice that could contribute towards how emotional her music was, though, as she had an ability as a writer to tap into feelings of love, loss, sadness and hope. This was present in ‘Four Women’, a song about women of colour that Simone managed to write in a day but was hesitant to play for anybody because of how honest she had been in her lyricism.
“’Four Women’ was written overnight,” said Simone, “But it took me four months before I had the nerve to play it to somebody because I thought it would be rejected. I played it for my husband on an aeroplane one day; I thought he wasn’t going to like it because it was so direct and so blatant.”
The song is incredibly stripped back, with slight percussion and a bassline. Piano trickles in occasionally, but only occasionally, which means that the heartfelt lyrics Simone sings come across all the more effectively. As the opening lines ring through, “My skin is black / My arms are long / My hair is woolly / My back is strong / Strong enough to take the pain inflicted again and again,” there is no mistaking that Simone is talking about the plight faced by women of colour.
“I am emphatically against the injustices of black people, of third world people,” said Simone in I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters and Their Craft, “’Four Women’ came to me after conversations I had with black women. It seemed we were all suffering from self-hatred. We hated our complexions, our hair, our bodies. I realised we had been brainwashed into feeling this way about ourselves by some black men and many white people.”
She continued, “I tried to speak to this in the song. And do you know, some black radio stations wouldn’t play it? It is true what they say: the truth hurts.”
‘Four Women’ is one of the most potent protest songs ever to be committed to music. Simone held nothing back when talking about the hardships faced by women of colour and how she could sing it in a way that is mixed with sorrow, sadness and anger, perfectly personifying the attitude of her and the women who inspired the song. This unfiltered approach to music is important, and the world wouldn’t be the same without it.
