Like her unprocessed voice and Bach-meets-barrelhouse piano style, Nina Simone's life story is peculiar, beautiful, sometimes off-key and off-color but deeply, disturbingly dramatic.
In the 1960s, the “high priestess of soul" wrote and/or sang some of the most moving anthems of a profound period in American history: “Backlash Blues," “Mississippi Goddam" and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black."
She had sought for years to find a place for her unique vision, and she found it alongside her friends Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Miriam Makeba and James Baldwin.
Hers was a dignified and formidable presence at many civil rights protests and benefit concerts. Yet all these decades later, sordid tales of disheveled onstage rants, mysterious hospitalizations and other indiscretions have threatened to eclipse her legacy.
In “Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone," Nadine Cohodas reinscribes into the historical record the musical contributions of a woman with prodigious gifts and sometimes unusual taste. The book is exhaustively researched, but unfortunately, in its plodding detail, it fails to grasp the essence of an artist for whom eccentricity and genius were never far apart.
There was always something strange about Simone's formidable talent. Born Eunice Waymon in rural North Carolina, she learned to play piano while she still had baby teeth, as an accompanist at the church where her mother preached.
Under the sponsorship of several white women, she trained to be a concert pianist. Those hopes were dashed when she was not admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, a rejection she resented her whole life, blaming it on racism.
Instead, she started performing standards at a club in Atlantic City: Nina Simone was born. From the outset, she mixed pop, jazz, blues and classical music sometimes in a single number. Such a style became her signature; she called it black classical.
Simone, who died in 2003, established the outline of her story in the 1992 autobiography “I Put a Spell on You." Cohodas relies on that book to get at her subject's thoughts and feelings, even while uncovering inaccuracies in the narrative.
The author of a biography of Dinah Washington, she draws heavily on media accounts, trying to pin down an artist surrounded by myth.
She also interviewed family members, friends, musicians, promoters and other acquaintances. But she never got a chance to talk to Simone herself, nor did she interview such key figures as the singer's daughter, ex-husbands and managers.
This lack of intimacy gives “Princess Noire" a distanced feeling. A biography of such an outspoken, sometimes tragic woman should be a page-turner, but Cohodas often misses the forest for the trees. She describes gig after gig, yet brushes over such important issues as Simone's bisexuality.
She does capture her subject's gradual unraveling. Given her classical background, Simone never got used to the rudeness of club and pop crowds. From the start, she denounced loud patrons and eventually, her onstage petulance overtook her; sometimes, she didn't even perform.
