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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.

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.

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.

This chapter explores the gulf between vocal practices and vocal theory as condensed in the theoretical problem of the gap. For Lacanians Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žizek, the gap is a key construct relative to voice, added to Freudian objects of the drive. What sets voice apart from Freud’s objects is that it loops out of a predetermined causal nexus and signifying chain, leaving a void in meaning and language and creating an irreparable gash in desire. Where Lacanians would understand voice as neither tangible nor perceptible or musical, this chapter hears voice as all three by listening to pressure put on the gap by classical and jazz singing voices that make perspicuous and material their own uncanny means of mechanical operation, especially via the “vocal break.” Prominent is Nina Simone, who lived dangerously in racialized spaces where vulnerability and risk are all-important. Looping in and out of signification, practices like hers expose the gap between signification and its lack while counting on listeners to invest in the performer's aleatory risk-taking. The chapter ends by offering a theory of voice that explains how relations between voice and performance, risk and (re)investment, operate with respect to language, musicality, intentionality, and signification.

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.

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.

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.

As described in this short chapter, movies about jazz sometimes inspire impressionable viewers to become professional musicians. Such films may even influence the specific ways they play. In addition, screen portrayals of jazz may influence how musicians (such as Sidney Bechet and Nina Simone) talk about their own lives, or about the music they play—though the evidence is often circumstantial.

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.