The duty of Nina Simone’s life: “I felt needed”
It’s perhaps the most noble thing on Earth to devote your entire life’s purpose to helping others. Yet for Nina Simone, that fire was so blazing that she had no choice but to follow this path, lest it should have turned to pure rage.
Possibly more than any other artist of her generation, Simone’s music was always intrinsically connected to the idea of protest, whether as small personal rebellions or a complete reckoning of the world. But this was much more than just a sonic brand or even a passion—it was her life’s calling to be at the forefront of that charge, and hell, mend anyone who tried to stop her.
Granted, this is a sentiment often floated around among many artists, that their music is so significant or vital to society in some way that their mission is considered integral to the functioning of the world as we know it. However, Simone was acutely aware of this as her purpose from the very first moment she set foot onstage, as representing the voiceless and repressed in music was not only her choice but her duty.
For obvious reasons, this fire was most expressly channelled in her forthright involvement in the fight for civil rights, as a moment in time where the singer realised that her voice carried more potency than ever before. “I felt more alive then than I feel now because I was needed and I could sing something to help my people,” she later explained in a French documentary about her life.
“That became the mainstay of my life. That became most important to me—not classical piano, not classical music, not even popular music, but the Civil Rights Movement,” Simone noted, fixating on one thing and one thing only until the battle for justice was won. Naturally, she fulfilled that mission and then some, with songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ coming to her “in a rush of fury, hatred and determination”, or the likes of ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’ striking an often-underrepresented celebratory tone.
But in Simone’s own eyes, her choices were simple: either change the world through music or become part of the violence that surrounded it. She admitted that her anger at the racial discrimination of the US in the 1950s and ‘60s was so palpable that she could have very easily been drawn into a life of anarchy and gun crime, and in many ways, performing was the only way she could express that wrath without physically taking herself to the frontline.
“If I had my way, I would have been a killer,” the singer strikingly admitted, before going on to double down on her point by adding: “If I had my way, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here today. I’d probably be dead somewhere because I would have used guns in those years. I was never a non-violent person.”
Even though this may seem like a startling thing to confess to some, it just speaks to the strength of Simone’s power and rage. No one ever changed the world without causing a scene, and she was certainly a testament to that.
