On Nina Simone and Freedom - 20020002

Nina Simone remains even today, widely known cultural figure across the world. She was not just a  genre bending blues/jazz/classical singer and musician, but to many, she was also a prominent civil rights activist. The distinction between these two categories may sometimes be hard to distinguish: was she an activist at heart who happened to be a singer? Was she a singer who wanted to be more involved in political affairs? Is it really safe to assume that music was a secondary part of her life and activism was the center, or vice versa? Maybe we can start by trying to understand where Simone was coming from. 

Simone started her musical training at a very early age with classical piano. In the documentary “What happened Miss Simone?” (Netflix) a classical performance on the piano by little Nina Simone (real name Eunice Waymon) is shown happening in a local church. This is where (later revealed) Simone experiences one of her earliest encounters with racism when her parents are asked to sit at the back of the hall for the performance. From that performance, Simone gets noticed by a Classical piano teacher who immediately wants to begin training her. By that time Simone wanted to become the first Black Female classical pianist in USA to play in Carnegie Hall. With background in musical training, Nina applied to the Curtis Institute of Music in her late teens, from which she was rejected. It was later that she found out that the rejection was on the basis of her skin color. In the Netflix documentary Simone expresses how it was a major jolt of realization for her about the prevalent racism where she was living. Later in her career, as she started singing and making a name for herself, she met Andrew Stroud who would later become her husband as well as manager. As time went by, Simone’s music career became more and more demanding, and so did her husband/manager, who would push her to her very limits to work and, sometimes in fits of rage would even resort to heavy, injury inducing violence. 

Racism was not the only thing Simone felt trapped by, it was also the immensely damaging and draining nature of her work and personal life during the first half of her music career. In the starting of the documentary, Simone talks about how she feels on stage, that that is where she feels free. She talks about this feeling of “freedom” as “to have no fear”. It is, according to her, a feeling which cannot be described but can only be felt, just like falling in love; you can hint towards it, you can describe the symptoms, but you cannot put it into words, you just know when you feel it. It was this feeling that Simone desperately yearned for always. She was a “free spirit”, as described in the final minutes of the documentary, who wanted to express herself to the fullest and be an unadulterated version of herself. This explains Simone’s transition towards increasingly politically charged songs which she started to write in the latter half of her career (despite causing commercial damage to her career) and her direct involvement with the civil rights movement. 

Coming back to the initial question of Nina Simone’s central identity, perhaps the only safe conclusion one can draw is that she was a someone who fought/was willing to fight for the feeling of freedom her whole life. Who met any obstacle in the way of her freedom, whether it be related to her race or her music, with fierce aggression. Who was, at heart, a free spirit trying to make her place in the world. The distinction between activism and music thus becomes of little use when one realizes that in Simone’s life, both of these were a result of and driven by one central feeling: Freedom.