i am sassa

Nina Simone is quite possibly my favorite ever female vocalist, a designation I take very seriously. I loved every second of painting her. And I am really shocked at how little I knew about her life. I listened to the Netflix documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone” while I painted. Her life was…quite shocking. I’m not going to get into the later bits, where the FBI starts asking questions and she leaves the country with her mental health in seriously bad shape (really, watch the doc), but here’s an intro to her life:

Nina Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon. She was the sixth of eight children, born dirt poor in North Carolina. Her Momma, a Methodist minister, thought Nina would be twins, but to her surprise the second baby was actually a piano.

Ok no it wasn’t, but Nina did start playing when she was THREE. Like, really well. She had perfect pitch and was a total prodigy. She jammed out in church, where the people of her town were so impressed some of them pitched in to pay for her lessons and schooling. During those lessons, she fell in love with classical music and decided she wanted to become the first black concert pianist.

Nina’s first concert was a recital when she was twelve. Her family was asked to segregate and sit in the back of the hall when they came to listen. Being a lil badass in training, she refused to play until her parents were moved to the front row. After years of lessons, Nina spent a year and a half at Juliard training to audition for a spot at the Curtis Institute of Music. She and her family were so sure she would be accepted that they all moved to Philadephia to be together, but she was declined admission because she was black.

Nina took a job playing piano at a bar to pay for more private lessons, which launched her singing career. The owner told her if she wanted to keep her job, she needed to sing along to her own accompaniment as well as play a bigger variety of music. She was never particularly interested in singing, but girl’s got PIPES, obviously. And she’s a contralto (like me!). Horrified that her mother would find out she was playing “the devil’s music”, she adopted the name Nina Simone.

Nina ended up marrying a bigtime turd who I don’t even want to honor with a name drop. He quit his job as a police officer to manage her career, worked her like a dog, and was abusive. Around this time, she began showing signs of what would later be identified as Bipolar Disorder, and began to get a reputation for violent outbursts. At concerts, Nina would often refuse to play until everyone was quiet, and occasionally left without playing. She said, “I just wanted them to listen to the music, like they did in the classical world. I thought they needed teaching. If they couldn’t listen, f**k it.” Indeed.

After a Baptist church bombing in Alabama, Nina wrote After the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, Nina wrote the song “Mississippi Goddam”, which is AWESOME. It was her first of many protest songs. Her song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” became, she says, the “black anthem”, and she became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement.

If you watch nothing else linked below, watch the beginning of my painting time lapse. It contains a snippet of footage from a 2003 BBC interview that nearly made me spit coffee. I loved learning about and painting Nina all day, and I am so looking forward to listening to her music again with a new understanding of her life.

Thank you, Nina Simone.