Why Nina Simone may have been the most eclectic musician of the 20th century
Listen to Nina Simone’s ‘What More Can I Say’ before you read any more of this. Done? Okay. Now listen to ‘Four Women’ before going any further. Finished? Great. Now, the last one, listen to ‘Lilac Wine’. You have just listened to three songs that follow on from one another on Simone’s album Wild Is The Wind and have undoubtedly experienced one of the broadest stretches of emotion contained within 12 minutes of music ever put to hallowed tape. That is the power of her voice.
‘Four Women’ is one of Simone’s most powerful songs. It’s a track dedicated to the plight of Black women, which Simone wrote almost instantly but was nervous about sharing. “’Four Women’ was written overnight,” she said, “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 blatant.”
The relatively stripped-back song is laced with pain, anger, and frustration. As Simone sings, “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.” The track is heartbreaking as Simone sings from the perspective of different women throughout, each with their own struggles and pain, resonating differently in every verse.
After that, we have ‘What More Can I Say?’. It is one of the most perfect depictions of longing ever written. As Simone sings towards the end of the track, “I would go anywhere, anywhere you go,” her voice is completely laced with undying love and the pain that comes with that love. She longs for the subject of the song, and it resonates in every syllable.
Finally, ‘Lilac Wine’ is an example of Simone taking on somebody else’s song and making it her own. The track was written 16 years prior by the Broadway actor James Shelton, but Simone’s version is where the life of that song begins and ends. As she fantasises about a lover while also pondering over whether she is ready to embrace them, we hear the trepidation in her voice as she takes a cover and makes it her own.
Simone was always considered hard to work with because she refused to sing easy love and pop songs. No doubt, this was because she understood her eclectic talent and knew it would be a crime to waste it. Throughout her career, she has always explored the range she has in her voice and was never shy about admitting how good she knew she was. As if those three songs alone aren’t enough to prove her range, Simone once commented on how she always hears her music in other artists’ work.
“It doesn’t matter to me what is going on today because my music encompasses every kind of mood that exists in human beings. That’s my stick,” she said, “I know 700 songs – just like that. So out of them, there is bound to be almost any kind of ‘style’ you could imagine.”
However, it is one thing to be able to grasp styles, it is another entirely to leave your commercial safe-zone at will and explore them without losing an ounce of your authority. Simone did that freely and with such aplomb that she barely gets credit for the fact that she could master a Leonard Cohen cover, move on to a jazz and Bossa nova hybrid the next, then hush the whole dancing audience with a stripped-back wallop of soul that set the world to rights. She could croon, scream, sing of love, and sing of the world’s lack of it.
Sadly, this perhaps stems from the fact that from the start of Simone’s career she wanted to be a classical star, but she wasn’t allowed simply because of her skin colour. It seems she said, ‘I’ll show them’ in a thousand different ways.
