“She sounds like a cat”: Which jazz legend did Nina Simone detest?
Nina Simone was never one to mince her words. She doled out plenty of harsh truths to people in power and the odd criticism of a fellow musician or two as well. Simone once said of The Beatles, “They are not exceptionally talented,” calling them “very, very lucky” to have become as successful as they were.
No other musician received the sharp end of Simone’s tongue quite as much as one singer in particular. A singer whose music had an enormous influence on Simone’s contemporary female vocalists and who pioneered singing about the black civil rights movement – something for which Simone herself became celebrated.
The comparisons between this singer and Simone were obvious, or so it seemed to many in the music press. Not to Simone herself, who responded to them angrily. “What an insult!” she told Brantley Bardin in a 1997 interview.
Incredibly, the singer Simone was referring to was Lady Day herself, Billie Holiday. Simone had often been compared to her as an up-and-coming jazz singer in the 1950s, as well as a prominent musician within the civil rights movement in the 1960s. But she wasn’t having it.
But why did Nina Simone have issues with Billie Holiday?
In her heyday, she’d launched a scathing attack on Holiday’s personal problems as well as her singing voice. “I don’t like drug addicts, and she sounds like a cat,” she explained. She reiterated her disgust with being compared to a drug addict to Bardin.
Simone’s opinion of Holiday seems a shame specifically because the two shared so much in common. Simone performed several powerful versions of Holiday’s harrowing Jim Crow-era black rights song ‘Strange Fruit’.
Holiday’s original recording of the song is now recognised as one of the greatest pieces of music in modern history. Words don’t do justice to its emotional impact or the heroic defiance of media whitewashing in its unflinching depiction of southern state lynchings.
There are clear parallels to be drawn between the stance Holiday took in recording and performing ‘Strange Fruit’ and Simone’s own 1964 composition ‘Mississippi Goddam’. Simone’s song was about six racially motivated murders in the state between 1955 and 1963.
Simone incorporated several other songs from Holiday’s concert setlists into her own live performances. The singers have each performed some of the best-known versions of George Gershwin’s ‘I Loves You, Porgy’, for instance.
And while Simone may not have been a drug addict, she had many personal struggles of her own. Holiday’s heroin addiction was an illness she suffered from, just as Simone suffered from bipolar disorder. Both health issues caused immense suffering to the two singers, as well as those close to them.
Additionally, Holiday and Simone were also both the victims of violent, abusive relationships with the men in their lives. They were black women in a white man’s world, yet still dared to use their inimitable talents to make bold political statements reflective of their identities.
It seems odd that someone with the immense moral courage of Nina Simone didn’t have any time for a woman who inspired so many other jazz singers, and shared so many similarities with her.
Maybe the early-career comparisons were repeated to her so often that they began to grate. After all, it’s important to acknowledge the dramatically different singing voices, performance styles and personalities of these two jazz greats.
