Happy Birthday Nina Simone

By Harry Amana

On the frequent six- to seven-hour trips I take to Philadelphia, my regular road buddy has been by daughter, Iyana, who recently turned 11.

We make the time fly by with bonding conversations as she calls them and by singing loudly to the songs of our favorite road artists: the Gap Band, James Brown, Prince, Parliament Funkadelic, Taj Mahal, India Arie, Santana, Olu Dara and the Coasters. She also tunes me out occasionally and listens with headphones on her own CD player to N Sync and the Dixie Chicks.

In April, she got interested in tapes I had put together of my favorite singer, Nina Simone. What a coincidence, because Nina died April 21, in Carry-le-Rouet, France, of natural causes, just a couple of weeks after Iyana had added her to our travel-music repertoire.

The music we listened to offered me an opportunity to talk history and politics to Iyana because a lot of Nina 's work includes "message" tunes, and Iyana wanted to know all about those messages. They included Nina's rendition of "Sunday in Savannah," a song-portrait in tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.; "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," a tribute to black youth and Playwright Lorraine Hansberry; and "Four Women," a Nina original that recalls African-American history through the description of four women of different skin colors.

It also included songs with more tragic messages, like Billy Holiday's "Strange Fruit," about a lynching; and Nina 's chilling version of Bob Dylon's "The Ballad of Hollis Brown," about a South Dakota farmer who lost his mind to poverty and bad luck and committed suicide after killing his wife and five children.

Nina was a significant discovery for Iyana because when Nina died at 70 a couple of weeks later, she felt that she had gotten to know the songstress on her own. "I'm glad I got to listen to her sing," she told me.

Now, to be completely honest, Nina was also a prima-donna diva who made me angry as hell on a number of occasions. I'll note just one: My travel 90 miles from Philly to New York for a midnight concert at Carnegie Hall, only to have the concert cancelled 30 minutes after midnight because Nina refused to perform. Word was that she had gone to lunch earlier that day after rehearsals and had been refused return entrance to the theater when a security guard didn 't recognize her.

Somehow, though, I understood that it was all about respect. And I continued to pay huge ticket prices for her performances over the years. After all, she had been my hero since the late '50s, crafting original songs and personal renditions of the songs of others that interpreted perfectly the pains we suffered from racial discrimination and the joys we felt from racial pride. Nina would grab hold of a tune called "West Wind" for example, chant its chorus ("unify us, don't divide us") for 15 minutes or more, make us hold hands and hug one another until there wasn't a dry eye in the theater.

"Mississippi Goddamn," on the other hand, made us defiant and determined to bring justice to the segregated South.

Indeed, she was a child of an age of radical change, having been born in Tryon, N.C., during the Great Depression, a part of the Northern Migration north during the '40s, and a leader in the movement for socially conscious art in the '60s and '70s.

And being a dark-skin woman with African features, who frequently wore her hair naturally, she had suffered many insults about beauty and blackness. In fact, though, she was a naturally beautiful woman, who enchanted us with her almond-shaped face, high forehead, full lips, and large, liquid eyes.

But now comes an alarming email message from a friend—another Nina devotee, who teaches in the Baltimore school system and used Nina's death as an opportunity to introduce her students to her work.

"I spent a whole lesson on her with my students," she writes. "One of the first things they said upon seeing her photograph in The New York Times was, 'Why she so ugly?' What does that say about us in 2003? Of the Black Arts/Black Power/Black is Beautiful movement? Of the demons that stalked Simone throughout her life?"

Iyana is a beautiful little woman. People tell her this all the time. And her features and skin color are closer to Nina 's than they are to other well-known black celebrities. This is why her discovery of Nina will, I hope, be even more important to her years from now, and why I 've written this column.

She has asked me a few times now, why I haven 't written about her. Well, Baby Girl, here it is. You, like Nina Simone, have touched by soul and lifted my spirits in ways that I hope you will fully understand some day. Nina's art lives in beautiful people like you.

Happy Birthday.

—By Harry Amana