Ruth Feldstein
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780195314038
- eISBN:
- 9780199344819
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195314038.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter focuses on Nina Simone, a classically trained pianist who shifted to more popular music in the 1950s and who, after 1963, used her music to participate in and recast black activism. ...
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This chapter focuses on Nina Simone, a classically trained pianist who shifted to more popular music in the 1950s and who, after 1963, used her music to participate in and recast black activism. Lyrics and performance strategies from In Concert (1964), including “Mississippi Goddam,” “Pirate Jenny,” and “Go Limp,” and reactions to Simone from around the world highlight the challenges she posed: With incendiary lyrics and fantasies of violence, she shattered the assumptions that African Americans would wait patiently for change or that prejudice was a Southern problem. Just a month after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Simone offered a vision of black power—one in which black female power was central. This chapter also charts the impact Lorraine Hansberry had on Simone (evident in songs “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” and “Four Women”), and the impact Africa had on Simone’s evolving artistry and politics.Less
This chapter focuses on Nina Simone, a classically trained pianist who shifted to more popular music in the 1950s and who, after 1963, used her music to participate in and recast black activism. Lyrics and performance strategies from In Concert (1964), including “Mississippi Goddam,” “Pirate Jenny,” and “Go Limp,” and reactions to Simone from around the world highlight the challenges she posed: With incendiary lyrics and fantasies of violence, she shattered the assumptions that African Americans would wait patiently for change or that prejudice was a Southern problem. Just a month after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Simone offered a vision of black power—one in which black female power was central. This chapter also charts the impact Lorraine Hansberry had on Simone (evident in songs “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” and “Four Women”), and the impact Africa had on Simone’s evolving artistry and politics.
Malik Gaines
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781479837038
- eISBN:
- 9781479822607
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479837038.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
The musical performances of Nina Simone are situated in her activist context, influenced by the civil rights movement and her friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Simone’s relationship ...
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The musical performances of Nina Simone are situated in her activist context, influenced by the civil rights movement and her friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Simone’s relationship to leftist performance is explored through her uses of materials authored by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and the differences between her approach and Brecht’s proposed techniques underscore Simone’s black expressive mode and illustrate modernity’s reliance on blackness. Attention to Simone’s uses of voice, piano, dress, and presence construct a sense of a radically politicized performance mode. Using the song “Four Women” and the legacy of Du Boisian double consciousness, Simone enacts a kind of quadruple consciousness that uses excess to multiply, rather than resolve, the alienations and displacements of black subjectivity in an agile and mobile performance of difference.Less
The musical performances of Nina Simone are situated in her activist context, influenced by the civil rights movement and her friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Simone’s relationship to leftist performance is explored through her uses of materials authored by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and the differences between her approach and Brecht’s proposed techniques underscore Simone’s black expressive mode and illustrate modernity’s reliance on blackness. Attention to Simone’s uses of voice, piano, dress, and presence construct a sense of a radically politicized performance mode. Using the song “Four Women” and the legacy of Du Boisian double consciousness, Simone enacts a kind of quadruple consciousness that uses excess to multiply, rather than resolve, the alienations and displacements of black subjectivity in an agile and mobile performance of difference.
Tanisha C. Ford
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469625157
- eISBN:
- 9781469625171
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469625157.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter examines how women soul singers Miriam Makeba, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, and Odetta developed a language of soul in the late 1950s and early 1960s that was then marketed by record ...
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This chapter examines how women soul singers Miriam Makeba, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, and Odetta developed a language of soul in the late 1950s and early 1960s that was then marketed by record labels such as RCA and Blue Note. The chapter demonstrates that cultural producers, who were mostly based in New York City’s Greenwich Village, created this language of soul to construct an aesthetic, political, and sonic representation of modern blackness. Because of the growing number of African students and diplomats traveling to the United States and the black media’s coverage of their presence, soul started to become synonymous with African fashion, hairstyles, and musical traditions. The marketplace responded by selling African-inflected “soul-jazz” music to young fans with a budding sense of social consciousness.Less
This chapter examines how women soul singers Miriam Makeba, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, and Odetta developed a language of soul in the late 1950s and early 1960s that was then marketed by record labels such as RCA and Blue Note. The chapter demonstrates that cultural producers, who were mostly based in New York City’s Greenwich Village, created this language of soul to construct an aesthetic, political, and sonic representation of modern blackness. Because of the growing number of African students and diplomats traveling to the United States and the black media’s coverage of their presence, soul started to become synonymous with African fashion, hairstyles, and musical traditions. The marketplace responded by selling African-inflected “soul-jazz” music to young fans with a budding sense of social consciousness.
Nadine Cohodas
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807872437
- eISBN:
- 9781469602240
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807882740_cohodas
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
Born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, Nina Simone began her musical life playing classical piano. A child prodigy, she wanted a career on the concert stage, but when the Curtis Institute of ...
More
Born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, Nina Simone began her musical life playing classical piano. A child prodigy, she wanted a career on the concert stage, but when the Curtis Institute of Music rejected her, the devastating disappointment compelled her to change direction. She turned to popular music and jazz but never abandoned her classical roots or her intense ambition. By the age of twenty-six, Simone had sung at New York City's venerable Town Hall and was on her way. Tapping into newly unearthed material on Simone's family and career, this book paints a portrait of the singer, highlighting her tumultuous life, her innovative compositions, and the prodigious talent that matched her ambition. With precision and empathy, it weaves the story of Simone's contentious relationship with audiences and critics, her outspoken support for civil rights, her two marriages and her daughter, and, later, the sense of alienation that drove her to live abroad from 1993 until her death. Alongside these threads runs a more troubling one: Simone's increasing outbursts of rage and pain that signaled mental illness and a lifelong struggle to overcome a deep sense of personal injustice.Less
Born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, Nina Simone began her musical life playing classical piano. A child prodigy, she wanted a career on the concert stage, but when the Curtis Institute of Music rejected her, the devastating disappointment compelled her to change direction. She turned to popular music and jazz but never abandoned her classical roots or her intense ambition. By the age of twenty-six, Simone had sung at New York City's venerable Town Hall and was on her way. Tapping into newly unearthed material on Simone's family and career, this book paints a portrait of the singer, highlighting her tumultuous life, her innovative compositions, and the prodigious talent that matched her ambition. With precision and empathy, it weaves the story of Simone's contentious relationship with audiences and critics, her outspoken support for civil rights, her two marriages and her daughter, and, later, the sense of alienation that drove her to live abroad from 1993 until her death. Alongside these threads runs a more troubling one: Simone's increasing outbursts of rage and pain that signaled mental illness and a lifelong struggle to overcome a deep sense of personal injustice.
Nadine Cohodas
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807872437
- eISBN:
- 9781469602240
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807882740_cohodas.3
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter shows that it was more a path emerging than a promise fulfilled that put Nina Simone on a makeshift stage in Montgomery, Alabama, on a sodden March night in 1965. Nina wanted to sing for ...
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This chapter shows that it was more a path emerging than a promise fulfilled that put Nina Simone on a makeshift stage in Montgomery, Alabama, on a sodden March night in 1965. Nina wanted to sing for the bedraggled men and women who had trekked three days from Selma to present their case for black voting rights to a recalcitrant Governor George Wallace. She was following the lead of James Baldwin, her good friend, mentor, and sparring partner at dinner-table debates, a role he shared with Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry. They were her circle of inspiration, writers who found their voice in the crackling word on the page—the deft phrase and the trenchant insight that described a world black Americans so often experienced as unforgiving.Less
This chapter shows that it was more a path emerging than a promise fulfilled that put Nina Simone on a makeshift stage in Montgomery, Alabama, on a sodden March night in 1965. Nina wanted to sing for the bedraggled men and women who had trekked three days from Selma to present their case for black voting rights to a recalcitrant Governor George Wallace. She was following the lead of James Baldwin, her good friend, mentor, and sparring partner at dinner-table debates, a role he shared with Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry. They were her circle of inspiration, writers who found their voice in the crackling word on the page—the deft phrase and the trenchant insight that described a world black Americans so often experienced as unforgiving.
Charles Nero
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781846319389
- eISBN:
- 9781781380901
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846319389.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Melvin Dixon’s 1991 novel Vanishing Rooms is widely regarded as a gay novel, but it intersects in specific ways with African American liberation struggles. First, it uses the queer doubling ...
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Melvin Dixon’s 1991 novel Vanishing Rooms is widely regarded as a gay novel, but it intersects in specific ways with African American liberation struggles. First, it uses the queer doubling convention that W. E. B. Du Bois proposed in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and earlier works to represent homoerotic desire between a feminized African American male and a reckless, masculine white male as the basis for interracial nation-building. Women, in this convention, cement the bonds of men with men that feminist and queer theorists contend are the basis of patriarchy. Second, the novel bears the unequivocal stamp of the Black Arts Movement through its use of two icons, Nina Simone and the Nation of Islam. While ending patriarchy remains a challenge, the novel brilliantly calls into question an exclusive focus on gay liberation that does not address the specificity of black experience.Less
Melvin Dixon’s 1991 novel Vanishing Rooms is widely regarded as a gay novel, but it intersects in specific ways with African American liberation struggles. First, it uses the queer doubling convention that W. E. B. Du Bois proposed in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and earlier works to represent homoerotic desire between a feminized African American male and a reckless, masculine white male as the basis for interracial nation-building. Women, in this convention, cement the bonds of men with men that feminist and queer theorists contend are the basis of patriarchy. Second, the novel bears the unequivocal stamp of the Black Arts Movement through its use of two icons, Nina Simone and the Nation of Islam. While ending patriarchy remains a challenge, the novel brilliantly calls into question an exclusive focus on gay liberation that does not address the specificity of black experience.
Ruth Feldstein
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780195314038
- eISBN:
- 9780199344819
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195314038.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
How It Feels to Be Free tells a story about black women entertainers and their relationships to the civil rights/black power movement. The book focuses on six performers: singer and film star Lena ...
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How It Feels to Be Free tells a story about black women entertainers and their relationships to the civil rights/black power movement. The book focuses on six performers: singer and film star Lena Horne; South African singer Miriam Makeba; pianist‐vocalist Nina Simone; jazz singer and actress Abbey Lincoln; and stage, film, and television actresses Diahann Carroll and Cicely Tyson. All six were more than “just” entertainers, all six took risks when they used their celebrity status to support civil rights, and all six insisted, in all sorts of ways, that the liberation they desired could not separate race from sex. By bringing them center stage, the book demonstrates the multiple ways that culture mattered to black activism in the 1960s; there was far more to culture and civil rights than “We Shall Overcome.” How It Feels to Be Free also explores the transnational circulation of black politics and culture; women celebrities who were popular around the globe helped to “export” ideas about black activism in the United States, but their experiences abroad also shaped their participation in U.S. activism. Finally, this book argues that gender was critical to the simultaneous development of black activism and feminism. These women did not call themselves feminists; but with their performances in music, film, and television, and their work in front of and away from cameras, they offered critiques and made demands that became central tenets of feminism generally and of black feminism specifically.Less
How It Feels to Be Free tells a story about black women entertainers and their relationships to the civil rights/black power movement. The book focuses on six performers: singer and film star Lena Horne; South African singer Miriam Makeba; pianist‐vocalist Nina Simone; jazz singer and actress Abbey Lincoln; and stage, film, and television actresses Diahann Carroll and Cicely Tyson. All six were more than “just” entertainers, all six took risks when they used their celebrity status to support civil rights, and all six insisted, in all sorts of ways, that the liberation they desired could not separate race from sex. By bringing them center stage, the book demonstrates the multiple ways that culture mattered to black activism in the 1960s; there was far more to culture and civil rights than “We Shall Overcome.” How It Feels to Be Free also explores the transnational circulation of black politics and culture; women celebrities who were popular around the globe helped to “export” ideas about black activism in the United States, but their experiences abroad also shaped their participation in U.S. activism. Finally, this book argues that gender was critical to the simultaneous development of black activism and feminism. These women did not call themselves feminists; but with their performances in music, film, and television, and their work in front of and away from cameras, they offered critiques and made demands that became central tenets of feminism generally and of black feminism specifically.
Malik Gaines
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781479837038
- eISBN:
- 9781479822607
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479837038.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left uses the notion of excess—its transgression, multiplicity, and ambivalence—to consider performances of the sixties that circulated a black political ...
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Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left uses the notion of excess—its transgression, multiplicity, and ambivalence—to consider performances of the sixties that circulated a black political discourse capable of unsettling standard understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Following a route from the United States to West Africa, Europe, and back, these performances staged imaginative subjectivities that could not be contained by disciplinary or national boundaries. Looking broadly at performances found in music, theater, film, and everyday life, the performers considered brought Marxist political strains into contact with black expressive strategies, restaging ideas of the subject that are proposed by each tradition. Attention to their work helps illuminate the role black theatricality played in what is understood as the radical energy of the sixties, and further reveals the abilities of blackness to transform social conditions. Following a transnational route forged by W.E.B. Du Bois and other modern political actors, this book considers the ways artists negotiated at once the local, national, and diasporic frames through which race has been represented. In the works of American singer and pianist Nina Simone, Ghanaian playwrights Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann, and California-based performer Sylvester, shared signs of racial legacy and resistance politics are articulated with regional specificity. Further, each artist explores the ways blackness responds to gender and sexuality as it proliferates images of difference. They bring important attention to the imbrication of these conditions.Less
Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left uses the notion of excess—its transgression, multiplicity, and ambivalence—to consider performances of the sixties that circulated a black political discourse capable of unsettling standard understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Following a route from the United States to West Africa, Europe, and back, these performances staged imaginative subjectivities that could not be contained by disciplinary or national boundaries. Looking broadly at performances found in music, theater, film, and everyday life, the performers considered brought Marxist political strains into contact with black expressive strategies, restaging ideas of the subject that are proposed by each tradition. Attention to their work helps illuminate the role black theatricality played in what is understood as the radical energy of the sixties, and further reveals the abilities of blackness to transform social conditions. Following a transnational route forged by W.E.B. Du Bois and other modern political actors, this book considers the ways artists negotiated at once the local, national, and diasporic frames through which race has been represented. In the works of American singer and pianist Nina Simone, Ghanaian playwrights Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann, and California-based performer Sylvester, shared signs of racial legacy and resistance politics are articulated with regional specificity. Further, each artist explores the ways blackness responds to gender and sexuality as it proliferates images of difference. They bring important attention to the imbrication of these conditions.
Nadine Cohodas
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807872437
- eISBN:
- 9781469602240
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807882740_cohodas.4
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter discusses the gifts that would turn Eunice Waymon into Nina Simone; they were apparent by the time Nina was three, though the passions, the mood swings, and the ferocious intensity that ...
More
This chapter discusses the gifts that would turn Eunice Waymon into Nina Simone; they were apparent by the time Nina was three, though the passions, the mood swings, and the ferocious intensity that marked her adult life were buried for years under her talent. She was born on February 21, 1933, the sixth of eight children, in Tryon, North Carolina, a town perched at the border between North and South Carolina, on the southern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The beautiful surroundings, the pleasant climate, and the good railroad service established by the turn of the century helped Tryon grow from a rural outpost to a haven for white artists and their friends, many of them from the North. Visitors stayed and put down roots, those with keen business instincts making investments that gave the town its municipal backbone.Less
This chapter discusses the gifts that would turn Eunice Waymon into Nina Simone; they were apparent by the time Nina was three, though the passions, the mood swings, and the ferocious intensity that marked her adult life were buried for years under her talent. She was born on February 21, 1933, the sixth of eight children, in Tryon, North Carolina, a town perched at the border between North and South Carolina, on the southern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The beautiful surroundings, the pleasant climate, and the good railroad service established by the turn of the century helped Tryon grow from a rural outpost to a haven for white artists and their friends, many of them from the North. Visitors stayed and put down roots, those with keen business instincts making investments that gave the town its municipal backbone.
Luther Adams
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807834220
- eISBN:
- 9781469603865
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807899434_adams.11
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This book concludes by discussing the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. After his murder, some African Americans across the nation responded with violent protests. In more than 168 cities blacks ...
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This book concludes by discussing the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. After his murder, some African Americans across the nation responded with violent protests. In more than 168 cities blacks expressed their sorrow and frustration with ongoing inequality as much as with King's death by burning, looting, and destroying property in the neighborhoods around them. Other African Americans reacted with shock, disbelief, and dismay. Nina Simone captured the sentiments of many blacks when she asked in the song “Why,” “What will happen now that the King of love is Dead?” In Louisville, however, all remained quiet. Dozens of white and black Louisvillians attended the funeral in Atlanta. Indeed, King's death seemed to pull blacks and whites closer together.Less
This book concludes by discussing the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. After his murder, some African Americans across the nation responded with violent protests. In more than 168 cities blacks expressed their sorrow and frustration with ongoing inequality as much as with King's death by burning, looting, and destroying property in the neighborhoods around them. Other African Americans reacted with shock, disbelief, and dismay. Nina Simone captured the sentiments of many blacks when she asked in the song “Why,” “What will happen now that the King of love is Dead?” In Louisville, however, all remained quiet. Dozens of white and black Louisvillians attended the funeral in Atlanta. Indeed, King's death seemed to pull blacks and whites closer together.
