Nina Simone diva with a cause: Tammy Johnson pays tribute to the "freedom singer" from Tryon, North Carolina.

I awoke one late April morning to a defiant voice on the radio singing,

   Just try to do your very best/
   Stand up and be counted with all the rest/
   For everybody knows about Mississippi
   Goddam/
   Oh but this whole country is full of lies/
   You're all gonna die and die like flies/
   I don't trust you anymore ...

As the voice faded to the background the DJ announced the passing of the "High Priestess of Soul," Nina Simone. In the days that followed, media tributes trumpeted her activism, global influence, and musical talent. They also profiled Simone as an inflexible diva who was "volatile" and "highly strung," and a "difficult interviewee" who often flashed an "irrational temper." But there was much more behind her demanding posture than arrogance and ego. In Simone's autobiography, I Cast a Spell on You, the artist voices an analysis of race, politics, and culture that dictated her public persona, on and off stage.

Setting the Baseline

Famed writer and personal confidant James Baldwin once told Simone, "This is the world you have made for yourself, Nina, now you have to live in it." Crafting the life she desired meant having a firm understanding of what preceded her. So it is fitting that she begins her story with the founding of her hometown, which she frames in the context of colonization, genocide, and the enslavement of native nations and African slaves. The opening scene places the reader in Tryon, North Carolina, where the annihilation of native people was the prerequisite for the creation of a railroad town for white homesteaders. Forced to flee to South Carolina, Simone's remaining native kin married African slaves in neighboring Chesney County, which she described as "real plantation country."

Fast forward to the 1920-30s, when Tryon is a resort town with an economy at the whim of tourist dollars. While whites and blacks mix at baseball games and church services, Jim Crow continued to dictate the economic livelihoods of blacks. "Of course there was no policy of racial justice in Tryon," wrote Simone, "it was just an easy-going small town with a council which existed only to ensure nothing happened to spoil the peaceful life the white folks led." As the depression era set in, Simone acknowledged the importance of the then newly-created federal safety net that kept her family afloat. Vital programs such as the National Relief Agency employed her father, John Divine Waymon, and provided food for the community.

Much like the baseline in a slow groove, race is the element that holds Simone's story together. But that realization was not easy to come by. Her mother's wish for her daughter to become the first black classically-trained pianist stood in great contrast to the lack of discussion on race in the family. Simone reflects, "It was ironic that Momma's ambition was so tied to race when she spent the whole of her life trying to ignore the reality of her colour. At home we never talked about race, ever. It was the great unspoken that we lived with but never brought out into the open." That would change soon enough.

A Memorable Hook

A musical prodigy at age three, Simone's piano prowess was honed through years of guided classical training. With the help of a scholarship fund collected by her hometown, she attended the Julliard School of Music in New York. She then set her sights on rounding off her study at Curtis Institute of Philadelphia. The experience taught Simone a harsh lesson about race and privilege.

"It had never occurred to me to wonder how many black students were studying at the Curtis Institute: it was a question I should have asked. The story that Carroll (her brother) heard through my uncle and his friends, black and white, was that the Institute wanted to enroll black students, but if blacks were going to be admitted then they were not going to accept an unknown black, that if they were to accept an unknown black then it was not going to be an unknown black girl, and if they were going to admit and unknown black girl, it wasn't going to be a very poor unknown black girl. People who knew--I was told white people, who knew, said that the reason I was turned down was because I was black."

Failing the Curtis black-acceptability test forced Simone to confront race in a new way. "I was finished with music," was the conclusion she reached. Fortunately, circumstance brought Simone back into the musical fold. But much like a hook in a song that repeats in your head throughout the day, race would be a reoccurring theme in her career.

Simone's transition was brief from an Atlantic City club singer to chart-topping recording artist with "I Loves You Porgy." Her repertoire crossed several musical genres, including jazz, blues, gospel, show tunes, folk, pop, and even nursery rhymes, often set to classical piano arrangement. Despite the complexity of her style, the press deemed her a jazz singer, which infuriated Simone. "Calling me a jazz singer was a way of ignoring my musical background because I did not fit into white ideas of what a black performer should be. It was a racist thing; 'If she's black she must be a jazz singer.'" Simone's conflicts with the music industry would be a lifelong struggle. Bad management, business naivete, and outright trickery resulted in years of legal tussles and lost revenue. Compounding these tensions was her involvement in the civil rights movement.

The Content of the Chorus

Simone's entry into the civil rights movement was not as natural as one may think. "I had not made a connection between the fights I had with any wider struggle for justice because of how I was raised: the Waymon way was to turn away from prejudice and to live your life as best you could, as if acknowledging the existence of racism was in itself a kind of defeat." Eventually, Simone received a political education by some of the leading voices of the day--Langston Hughes, Stokely Carmicheal, Lorraine Handsberry and Godfrey Cambridge.

As Simone's commitment to civil rights grew, the focus of her career moved beyond entertainment and profit. She earned the title "Freedom Singer" as she began to use her celebrity to attract additional attention to the struggles she represented. Songs like "Come Ye, Why? (The King is Dead)" and "Old Jim Crow," added to the heat of the times. For this, Simone endured death threats and even an attempt by state troopers to stop her concert by preventing her plane from landing in Montgomery.

While acknowledging the difficulty of relaying the immensity of racism in song, she desired to raise the bar on the content of protest music. "Until songs like 'Mississippi Goddam' just burst out of me I had a musical problem as well.... I didn't like 'protest music' because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative it stripped the dignity away from the people it was trying to celebrate."

Simone also took on the dual forces of sexism and racism in the song "Four Women," a scathing commentary of society's stereo-typing of black womanhood. The song was banned by many radio stations and criticized by some in the black community. "The song told a truth that many people in the U.S.--especially black men--simply weren't ready to acknowledge at the time," was Simone's retort. "Black women didn't know what the hell they wanted because they were defined by things they didn't control, and until they had the confidence to define themselves they'd be stuck in the same mess forever--that was the point the song made."

The shift in political climate of the late 1960s left Simone cold. "In the movement the great plans for a national reawakening were being replaced by local projects in individual cities. The attitude was no longer 'What do we want?' but 'What can we get?'" she lamented. To make matters worse, record companies narrowed their interest to crossover acts. "The establishment was biting back. It was no accident that the most active black musicians couldn't get recording deals with the major labels, no accident at all."

"Backlash Blues," cowritten by Langston Hughes, captured her defiant attitude toward the times.

   But the world is big/Big and bright and
   round/And it's full of folks like me/Who are
   black, yellow, beige and brown/ Mr. Backlash,
   I'm gonna leave you/ With the Backlash blues/
   Mr. Backlash, Mr Backlash/ Just what do you
   think I got to lose/I'm gonna leave you/ With
   the Backlash blues/You're the one will have the
   blues/ Not me, just wait and see ...

Fed up with the backlash and America's special brand of racism, Simone left the United States for Barbados in 1974. Her self-imposed exile took her to Liberia, Switzerland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, South Africa, Paris, and finally to Carry-le-Rouet in southern France--the place she called home until her death.

Throughout the years she continued to record and tour, even returning to the U.S. in the mid-'80s to perform. Nearly wheelchair-bound, in 2001 Simone performed at Carnegie Hall for more than an hour. After the audience begged for an encore, the playful diva returned to the stage to admonish, "Go home!" But Simone would never again call America home. She explained her self-imposed exile in a 1999 interview with the BBC. "There is no way I am ever going to go back there and live. You get racism crossing the street, it's in the very fabric of American society."

A Lingering Refrain

Simone has inspired countless artists throughout the years, from Aretha Franklin to Norah Jones. "She was ahead of her time," India Arie told the Associated Press upon hearing of her passing, "as a concert-level piano player who sang, wrote, and spoke her mind. I aspire to be more like her."

In her final years Simone was impaired by failing health and made infrequent public appearances. In the BBC interview, Simone summed up her career in this way: "As a political weapon, it has helped me for 30 years to defend the rights of American blacks and third world people all over the world, to defend them with protest songs. To move the audiences to make them conscious of what has been done to my people around the world."

Tammy Johnson heads the Race and Public Policy program of the Applied Research Center and is a frequent contributor to ColorLines.