‘Four Women’: The Nina Simone song that inspired generations of artists
The 1960s were a decade of radical change, and Nina Simone was one of the most radical public figures of that time. The soul singer had already reached stardom by the early 1960s before she was completely, not to mention understandably, radicalised by two white supremacist terror attacks taking place months apart from each other.
The first was the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers on June 12th, 1963. The second was the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, by the Ku Klux Klan. Up until that point, Simone had viewed pop music as a job. She had no love for a music industry that didn’t love her back and had no reason to do so. She saw the industry as a tool to fund her classical music studies, but after these two events, everything changed.
The sheer rage she felt at how not only had those two events occurred but justice would never be truly done for them completely changed the way she viewed her work. She had been writing and composing for her work since her debut album, but from then on, she began using her work to vocalise that rage. The first effort was ‘Mississippi Godamn’, a song that, as she put it, came to her “in a rush of fury, hatred and determination”.
Thus began a string of albums explicitly informed by her work with the civil rights movement, beginning with her 1964 live album Nina Simone In Concert. Two years later came one of the most moving, controversial and influential of these works, ‘Four Women’, the single from the 1966 album Wild Is The Wind. A reckoning with the legacy of American racism, specifically on women of colour.
Who are the ‘Four Women’ Nina Simone sang about?
In the song, Simone embodies four characters that she speaks as over its four minutes and twenty-seven seconds. The first is Aunt Sarah, a representation of how strong the African-American community had to become in the face of institutional racism, “Strong enough to take the pain / Inflicted again and again”. Second is Saffronia, a comment on the way that mixed folks find themselves caught “Between two worlds / I do belong”.
Following up is Sweet Thing, a harrowing depiction of one of the ways that black women found a space (of sorts) within white communities as sex workers. “My hips invite you / My mouth like wine / Whose little girl am I? / Anyone who has money to buy”. Finally, Peaches is the culmination of the song, a spirit of vengeance, driven to violence due to the legacy of slavery. “I’ll kill the first mother I see / My life has been rough / I’m awfully bitter these days / Because my parents were slaves.”
Pretty much all of Simone’s work was too radical for mainstream acceptance. The sheer vitriol and shocking power of ‘Four Women’, however, saw it blacklisted from a number of Black radio stations, much to her chagrin. When interviewed for I Got Thunder: Black Woman Songwriters and Their Craft, Simone elaborated on what had inspired the song in particular, saying, “’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,” she added. “I realized we had been brainwashed into feeling this way about ourselves by some black men and many white people. 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.”
However, the legacy of the song today speaks for itself. A decade after it was released, Julie Dash adapted the song into one of the first experimental short films ever made by a black female filmmaker. Nearly five decades after its release, Christina Ham adapted the song into the play Nina Simone: Four Women, which premiered in 2016. In the obituary she wrote for Dr Simone in 2003, playwright and journalist Thulani Davis summed up the song’s enduring power much better than I ever could.
“For African American women it became an anthem affirming our existence, our sanity, and our struggle to survive a culture which regards us as anti-feminine,” Davis said. “It acknowledged the loss of childhoods among African American women, our invisibility, exploitation, defiance, and even subtly reminded that in slavery and patriarchy, your name is what they call you.”
“This Simone song was a call heard by Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and countless artists who come to mind as women who gave us a whole generation of the stories of Aunt Sara, Safronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches. May the High Priestess’s cult widen to take in the unwise who made her as outrageous as she was.”
