In the late 50's Nina Simone recorded her first tracks for the Bethlehem label. These are still remarkable displays of her talents as a pianist, singer, arranger and composer. Songs such as "Plain Gold Ring", "Don't Smoke In Bed" and "Little Girl Blue" soon became standards in her repertoire. One song, "I Loves You, Porgy", from the opera "Porgy and Bess", became a hit and the nightclub singer became a star, performing at Town Hall, Carnegie Hall and the Newport Jazz Festival. Even from the beginning of her career on, her repertoire included jazz standards, gospel and spirituals, classical music, folk songs of diverse origin, blues, pop, songs from musicals and opera, African chants as well as her own compositions. Sometimes her voice changes from dark and raw to soft and sweet. She pauses, shouts, repeats, whispers and moans. Sometimes piano, voice and gestures seem to be separate elements, then, at once, they meet. Add to this all the way she puts her spell on an audience, and you have some of the elements that make Nina Simone into a unique artist.
When four black children were killed in the bombing of a church in Birmingham in 1963, Nina wrote "Mississippi Goddam", a bitter and furious accusation of the situation of her people in the USA. The strong emotional approach of this song and the others on her first Philips record Nina Simone In Concert, would become another characteristic in her art. She uses her voice with its remarkable timbre and her careful piano playing as means to achieve her artistic aim: to express love, hate, sorrow, joy, loneliness - the whole range of human emotions - through music, in a direct way. Although Nina was called "High Priestess of Soul" and was respected by fans and critics as a mysterious, almost religious figure, she was often misunderstood as well. When she wrote "Four Women" in 1966, a bitter lament of four black women whose circumstances and outlook are related to subtle gradations in skin color, the song was banned on Philadelphia and new York radio stations because "it was insulting to black people…" Her repertoire includes more Civil Rights songs: "Why? The King of Love is Dead", capturing the tragedy of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, "Brown Baby", "Images" (based on a Waring Cuney poem), "Go Limp", "Old Jim Crow", "… One song", "To be Young, Gifted and Black", inspired by Lorraine Hansberry's play with the same title, became the black national anthem in the USA.
Simone fell on turbulent times in the 1970s, divorcing her husband/manager Andy Stroud, encountering serious financial problems, and becoming something of a nomad, settling at various points in Switzerland, Liberia, Barbados, France, and Britain. After leaving RCA, she recorded rarely, although she did make the critically well-received Baltimore in 1978 for the small CTI label. She had an unpredictable resurgence in 1987, when an early track, "My Baby Just Cares for Me," became a big British hit after being used in a Chanel perfume television commercial. In 1993, her record A Single Woman marked her return to an American major label, and her profile was also boosted when several of her songs were featured in the film Point of No Return. She published her biography, I Put a Spell on You, in 1991, but grew increasingly frail throughout the late '90s and had to be helped on to the stage during a 2001 Carnegie Hall performance. Nina Simone died on April 21, 2003 at her home in Carry-le-Rouet, France, where she had been spending much of her retirement.
