Eunice Kathleen Waymon was intent on becoming a classical pianist, studying at the famous Julliard School of Music in New York. But when she tried to move on to the Curtis Institute on a scholarship, and was refused, she blamed racism. So, when she turned to playing “the devil’s music” in nightclubs to make a living, she had to change her name to avoid family embarrassment. She chose Nina Simone.
And her increasingly radical politics encouraged her to sing, often angry songs, to go with her piano.
Political pressure followed, drugs entered the equation, but, despite a life on the edge, she lived until she was 70 in 2003 – dying just after Curtis offered her an honorary degree.
To someone of my generation, a Nina Simone song is so intrinsically hers – its selection for meaning, it’s vibrant attack in her voice, the passionate response of listeners at concerts, achieving an effect well beyond mere entertainment.
So it came as a surprise last night at the Sydney Festival cabaret show in which the Kunwinjku/Yugoslav actor, Ursula Yovich sings Nina Simone to realise that Simone herself mostly sang other people’s songs – from George Harrison to Kurt Weill, from Jacques Brel to Galt MacDermott, the composer of Hair. And I guess the surprise was emphasised because Yovich made little attempt to copy Simone’s voice timbre – a wise move – while singing numbers from Porgy & Bess and Hair, even a vairry French version of Ne Me Quitte Pas.
All commendably sung – though I’d argue that some of the numbers could have lifted further towards Simonean heights if the band had included a sax.
But did Yovich’s gentle commentary linking Simone’s brand of racial politics with her own First Nations references and reminders that “History is now, not a long time ago” as she threw Gaza, South Sudan and Black deaths in custody into the melting pot, really take us beyond excellent entertainment? For my researches had discovered that when Simone wrote the song Mississippi Goddam (unsung by Yovich), she claimed it was as an substitute for her actually murdering someone in revenge for the racist bombing of an Alabama church that killed four children.
And she hadn’t been joking; no one would sell her a gun!
Thankfully, I couldn’t imagine Ursula Yovich killing anyone. But should her performance have been quite so comfortable?
Of course, the highpoint for me was the song that Nina Simone made absolutely her own – Strange Fruit. Who even knew that Billie Holliday had recorded it originally? It retained all its visceral power to shock in Yovich’s hands, and I don’t think I’d ever noticed the raw irony of a reference to “the gallant South” before. Lynching has never sounded so very close.
Probably the most relevant song for First Nations Australians is another Simone work, Four Women. Did Yovich announce it as a message from the singer‘s heart? I must have missed it. For it concerns the different expectations imposed on four variously shaded Black women from the dark Aunt Sarah, still conscious of slavery, to the militant but pale Peaches – a name that Simone and Yovich both scream out. Definitely an issue for identified Aborigines today. And musically, a great success for the band in Sydney, matched only by the closing banger which carried us out into the night, ‘I wish I could share all the love that’s in my heart’.
Simone’s origins in America’s Black churches came right at the beginning with ‘Sinnerman’, a nakedly revivalist number from her childhood when it was used at services by her Methodist minister mother to encourage people to confess their sins. Simone’s most famous versions go on for more than 10 minutes, but Yovich kept it short as she bopped up and down on bare feet in a not totally gospel style. ‘I’m just a soul whose intentions are good; please don’t let me be misunderstood’ more than made up religiously.
Definitely better than Simone’s snatch of ‘Hair’ – ‘Ain’t Got No/I Got Life’ – which really shouldn’t have left the counter-culture stage of the original show, where I never felt it was intended as a Black anthem.
Ursula Yovich has been around a bit these days, with her own angry musical, ‘Barbara and the Camp Dogs’ successfully under her belt. So why did I feel that ‘Young, gifted and Black’ might have been just a touch self-referential? And why did I get the feeling that anger was held back in this show, perhaps because of her recognition that Nina Simone “paid a price for speaking up”?
