BEFORE: OK, today's film is going to wrap up the Black History part of the chain - I know, I know, it wasn't a full month. But I only had so many documentaries that would link up with each other - I'll try to do better next time. I remember hearing good things about this doc, but it kind of fell through the cracks in previous years, and then when I saw it was on Netflix, I kind of remembered about it again, so it made the cut this time around, and it helped me fill in the gaps caused when I realized that Mother's Day was later on the calendar than I thought. I'm still poised to hit films about mothers right on time, now that I added the extra docs in.
Walter Cronkite carries over from "Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool". Tomorrow I'll re-tell the story of my encounters with Mr. Cronkite.
THE PLOT: A documentary about the life and legend of Nina Simone, an American singer, pianist and civil rights activist labeled the "High Priestess of Soul".
AFTER: I found out about Nina Simone the same way I discovered Buddy Guy - from her covers of Beatles songs, which I collected for a long while. She covered "Here Comes the Sun" and also "My Sweet Lord" (which didn't count for my collection because it's a solo Harrison song) and for some reason when I was ripping all of my CDs to iTunes I quit before I got all the covers covered, so I don't have a digital copy of these songs handy, I'll have to check them out some other way tonight.
There's so much more to Nina Simone than cover songs - or is there? Now I'm not so sure, because that does seem to be like 90% of her catalog. Based just on "Here Comes the Sun", she had a way of re-working songs, changing the tempos, the phrasings, doing some improvisational additions, making each song her own, but I bet the strict Beatles fans may have hated her renditions. But back then, simply EVERYBODY was doing this, from Richie Havens to George Benson to Booker T. & the M.G.'s. As long as the songwriters got the credit and the publishing royalties, who cared?
Nina Simone also got noticed for her covers of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", "The House of the Rising Sun" and the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody". Even her very earliest recordings were covers, like a song from "Porgy & Bess" or "I Put a Spell on You", or the jazz standard "My Baby Just Cares For Me", which she released in 1962, but it became a hit after being used in a perfume commercial in 1987, however, Simone had already signed away her rights to any royalties. Something similar happened with the song "Feelin' Good", which she recorded in 1965, but it didn't become super popular until 1994, and then again when Adam Lambert sang it on his season of "American Idol".
Like so many other artists and athletes profiled in these past two weeks (jeez, was Easter just TWO WEEKS ago? It feels like so much longer...) Nina had a troubled marriage. I can't tell now if that's just par for the course among famous people, like Muhammad Ali had THREE troubled marriages, I wonder why... But Nina married a NYC cop who became her manager, and while he booked her shows and moved with her into a nice house up in Mt. Vernon, it doesn't seem like they had much in common except for their problems. (Actually, this was her second marriage, the doc doesn't even mention her first, I guess because it was so short.). And much like with Miles Davis, there was domestic abuse - but this also might be par for the course for the 1960's, as the alpha males were all afraid of women's rights, and were raised in homes where their mothers were treated as inferior. Still, that's no excuse.
Then, also like many of the artists and athletes profiled in these past two weeks, Nina got involved in the Civil Rights movement in the mid-60's, but her husband, not so much. So she wrote a protest song about the church bombings in Birmingham, Alabama, which was a turning point for her, but her husband could only see that she was losing gigs and being boycotted. The couple lived close to Malcolm X in Mt. Vernon, their kids played together, and then Simone recorded a song written by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, and another one based on an unfinished play by Lorraine Hansberry, called "Young, Gifted and Black". And then after the MLK assassination, she dedicated a song to him, called "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)".
Another turning point in 1970, when Simone took off for Barbados, and it was a bit unclear whether she was just going on vacation between gigs, or fleeing the country to avoid prosecution for unpaid taxes (allegedly unpaid as a protest against the Vietnam War). She left her wedding ring behind, so her husband naturally assumed this meant she wanted a divorce. Well, she did have an affair with the Prime Minister of Barbados, supposedly, though this doc conveniently doesn't mention that. From Barbados she relocated to Liberia, an African country founded by former U.S. slaves, and there she felt more comfortable. Her daughter joined her there, but found Simone to be abusive toward her, so she came back to NYC and lived with her father.
By the early 1980's she was performing regularly at a jazz club in London, all the while wishing she could go back to her original dream of becoming the world's first Black classical pianist. But I guess at some point that ship sailed, she'd had a successful pop career and there was no going back - I feel her pain, as I've come to realize that I'll never write that killer screenplay or that book about Beatles covers, there's just no time to do it. And by the mid-1980's, Simone had moved again, to perform at another jazz club in Paris. She was apparently rude to the patrons on a daily basis, or perhaps it was all part of the act, again it's tough to determine. At some point a long-time friend found her in Paris and persuaded her to move to the Netherlands, where she finally got some medication for her bipolar disorder and tried to be happy for a while.
Finally, late in life, she got some recognition from the industry, like a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 2000, and an honorary degree from the Curtis Institute of Music, which had refused her entry at the start of her career. Four Grammy nominations, but no wins - and according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, her official status there is "Umm, it's complicated." But hey, she's in the R&B Hall of Fame, and her protest song "Mississippi Goddam" was preserved by the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". So there you go, who can argue with that?
Also starring Stanley Crouch (also carrying over from "Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool"), George Wein (ditto), Eleanor Belinfanti, Gerrit De Bruin, Dick Gregory (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Elisabeth Henry, Lisa Simone Kelly, Gregory Marlow, Roger Nupie, Ilyasah Shabazz, Attallah Shabazz, Al Shackman,
with archive footage of Nina Simone (last seen in "Summer of Soul"), Stokely Carmichael (ditto), James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), Sammy Davis Jr. (also carrying over from "Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool"), Merv Griffin (last seen in "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali"), Malcolm X (ditto), Lorraine Hansberry, Hugh Hefner (last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Andrew Young (last seen in "Citizen Ashe")
RATING: 5 out of 10 live albums
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