Nina Simone, Diva Out of Carolina

Book Review

PRINCESS NOIRE
The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone
By Nadine Cohodas
Illustrated. 449 pp. Pantheon Books. $30


By ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
Published: February 25, 2010

“I will never be your clown,” Nina Simone shouted at a restless nightclub audience in Cannes in 1977. The mostly French-speaking crowd was either unable or unwilling to join her in a singalong, and she took it as a personal affront. “God gave me this gift — and I am a genius. I worked at my craft for six to 14 hours a day, I studied and learned through practice. I am not here just to entertain you. But how can I be alive when you are so dead?” Her speech only prompted more requests for her to “SING!” She managed to get through some songs before delivering her parting words. “You owe me,” she railed. “I don’t wear a painted smile on my face, like Louis Armstrong.”

Scenes like this were all too common, especially during the latter half of Simone’s career. Her reputation as mercurial, moody and combative was well established, and she did little to dispel this image in her memoir, “I Put a Spell on You.” She was nothing if not paradoxical. She promoted black militancy and spoke of her love for “my people,” but often treated black audiences with contempt and condescension. She beat up white audiences, too, sometimes declaring her disdain for white people, and yet sustained a substantial crossover following with covers of songs associated with their youth culture. She might show up an hour or two late, ramble incoherently onstage and suddenly give a performance that could bring a weary crowd to tears.

But when she called herself a genius — a term usually reserved for male artists — it was not mere hyperbole. Indeed, Nadine Cohodas’s disturbing portrait in “Princess Noire” sets out to confirm Simone’s genius. The author lingers on her stage performances, her musical decisions, her sartorial choices — the alchemy she created in sound and fury. Cohodas, who has written books about Dinah Washington and Chess Records, devotes more space to Simone’s music than any biography to date. But as hard as the author tries, she can’t avoid the fact that Si­mone’s fame has more to do with her tempestuous behavior, both on- and offstage.
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By the end of her “tumultuous reign,” Simone was a shadow of her former self, a woman practically broken by an unscrupulous industry, exploitative men and her own demons. Like her performances, the book’s final chapters are hard to experience but impossible to ignore. And like so many of us who saw Simone onstage when she should have been convalescing or simply enjoying life, readers may feel an urgent need to listen to her old recordings to remind themselves of what they loved about her in the first place.

Robin D. G. Kelley’s most recent book is “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.”

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If it wasn't for YouTube I may have never discovered this wonderful performer.