NINA SIMONE: VOICE OF JUSTICE, VOICE OF JAZZ

A sermon prepared by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
Sunday, February 10, 2008 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority
has made the world better.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.

My skin is black
My arms are long
My hair is wooly
My back is strong
Strong enough to take the pain
Inflicted again and again

—Nine Simone, “Four Women"

Young, gifted and black
How I long to know the truth
There are times when I look back
And I am haunted by my youth.

—Nine Simone, “Young, Gifted and Black"

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Note: This sermon was a multi-media presentation, including audio clips of Nina Simone’s voice, photographs, and video. This is the text of the presentation, with lyric excerpts included where audio clips or video clips were used in the service. For the best appreciation of this sermon, I suggest you obtain a CD of Nina Simone singing these songs, and listen in the appropriate places. All the songs used in this sermon except “Brown Baby” can be heard on “Nina Simone: Anthology” a two-CD collection of early and later recordings, including some of her civil rights anthems. RCA/BMG Heritage 82876530152. “Brown Baby” can be found on “Nina Simone at the Village Gate (Live).” All songs can also be purchased individually through the iTunes store. A DVD copy of the entire service can be borrowed from the church office. We hope a podcast of the sermon will be posted sometime soon.

* * * *

Her name was Nina Simone. And she was gifted with a voice. Her name was Nina Simone. And she was gifted with a musical genius. A genius that allowed her to weave a magical, musical spell on her audience. In a small, smoke-filled basement jazz club in Greenwich Village, or in an open air sports stadium filled with thousands upon thousands of screaming, expectant fans. She was: Nina Simone!

I wish I knew how
It would feel to be free
I wish that I could break
All the chains holding me
I wish I could say
All the things that I'd like to say
Say 'em loud say 'em clear
For the whole round world to hear

"I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel"
By Richard Lamb, William Taylor

Where ever she was, where ever her voice, her passion, her anger, her majesty would appear, she would fix a steely, stern eye upon those who had gathered before her. She would survey them, almost daring them to remain for what was to come. Everyone would fall silent. One did not speak when Nina Simone sang. One almost did not breath when Nina Simone sang. It was as if she had conjured up the Spirit of the Universe itself, as if some unstoppable power was taking possession of her vocal chords, as if some force from beyond this world was guiding her fingers upon the piano keys. Nina Simone was a high priestess of jazz, of blues, of soul, of folk, of pain, of loss, of sensuality, of struggle, of civil rights, of the freedom fight. Nine Simone was a high priestess of life itself. Lost in her music, generations of listeners found themselves.

I put a spell on you
Cause you’re mine
You better stop the things you do
I ain’t lyin’
No, I aint’ lyin’
You know I can’t stand it
Your running around
You know better Daddy
You know I can’t stand it
Cause you put me down
I put a spell on you
Cause you’re mine

"I Put a Spell On You"
By Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

But Nina Simone’s story is more than the tale of a weaver of spells. For her life was more than a journey into the music. Her life was a great spiritual journey. If the spiritual journey is the discovery of what gives meaning to one’s life, if the spiritual journey is a journey into the deep experience of being alive, then hers is a story to inspire and, ultimately, warn us all. Her story invites us to ask: “What voice do I have to share with the world?” “What message am I asked to carry with my life?”

Nina Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina. She was one of eight children, born to a Daddy who got by doing odd jobs and running occasional businesses, born to a Momma who was fifteenth in a long, long line of Methodist preachers. The family was poor, and struggled before, during, and after the depression. Nina Simone recalled: “Most of what I remember from the very earliest part of my life is tied up with . . . music. My first memory is of my mother’s singing. When she was around the house she sang all the time, in a high, trilling voice. She sang the songs she’d sing at Bible meetings and they became the soundtrack to my infant life.

By the age of four she was playing piano for her Mamma’s church meetings, for hours at a time. More than talented, little Eunice clearly had musical genius, and her Mamma decided that she would be trained to become the nation’s first nationally known African American classical pianist.

The only problem was that the family was too poor to pay for piano lessons. Never the less, a teacher was approached. The white woman, who Eunice called Mizz Mazzy, was stunned by this quiet, shy, little black girl with a rare gift to touch the keys with such knowing. She immediately took Eunice as her student, and the town, white and black, rallied. They all donated money to pay for her lessons.

But although a white woman could teach a little black girl to play the piano, this was still the South in the late 1930’s. There came a small but painful moment when a little girl’s bubble of innocence was forever burst, and suddenly the kindness of so many strangers was seen in a greater context. Nina Simone wrote:

“When I was eleven years old I was asked to give [my first] recital in the town hall [so people could see how I was progressing in my lessons]. I sat at the piano with my trained elegance while a white man introduced me, and when I looked up my parents, who were dressed in their best, were being thrown out of their front row seats in favour of a white family I had never seen before. And Daddy and Mommy were allowing themselves to be moved. Nobody else said anything, but I wasn’t going to see them treated like that and stood up in my starched dress and said if anyone expected to hear me play then they’d better make sure that my family was sitting right there in the front row where I could see them, and to hell with poise and elegance. So they moved them back. But my parents were embarrassed and I saw some of the white folks laughing at me.

All of a sudden it seemed a different world, and nothing was easy any more. I really had thought that all white people were like Mizz Mazzy, all kind and elegant, all polite. But now prejudice had been made real for me and it was like switching on a light.”

“I started to think about the way I felt when I walked over to Miz Mazzy’s house and crossed the railroad track into the white district. The day after the recital I walked around feeling as if I had been flayed and every slight, real or imagined, cut me raw. But the skin grew back again a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black.”

Brown baby, brown baby,
As you grow up
I want you to drink
from the plenty cup.
I want you to stand up tall and proud.
I want you to speak up
clear and loud.
Brown baby.

"Brown Baby"
(Traditional)

With the financial support of the local community, which now shared a collective pride in her precocious talent, Eunice was sent to a girl's boarding school and then to the Juilliard School of Music in New York. Her young life revolved around classical piano, training hours and hours everyday, rising well before the sun to begin her scales, and ending long after everyone else had gone to bed. She had no life but classical piano.

That dream came to an abrupt end at age 21. She was refused a scholarship by the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia, where she had long planned to refine her talent. Later, those involved in the decision suggested that the decision had nothing to do with her talent. Rather, there was no way a poor, African American girl was going to be financed to study at their school, no way they would put a poor black girl on the path to greatness. But at that time, Nina believed it was because someone finally saw she had no talent. Nina believed that someone had finally seen the truth about her and inferiority. Disillusioned, with no identity or dream to hold to, she fell into deep depression. She emerged, determined to earn money to finance her own education. She started playing piano for voice teachers, learning the standards and show tunes of the time.

In the summer of 1954, she took an engagement at the Midtown Bar and Grill, Atlantic City. On the first night she played classical and gospel selections on the piano without once opening her mouth. She thought the job was only for piano playing. The following night, the club owner told her that either she sang or she was out of a job. That night, she began a reluctant singing career. But she had a problem, her minister mother would never approve of Eunice Waymon singing secular songs in a bar. To avoid being found out, Eunice needed to choose another name. And thus, Eunice Waymon, classical piano prodigy, became Nina Simone, a sultry saloon singer. But she did not say in that dive of a bar for very long. New York clubs called, and Nina packed her bags for stardom.

Three years later she was performing jazz and blues at Carnegie Hall. "I'm where you always wanted me to be but I'm not playing Bach," she wrote to her parents. Her mother would never forgive her for not succeeding as a classical pianist.

Her first album, in 1958, was a phenomenal debut, and gave Nina her first million seller. Her repertoire included jazz standards, gospel and spirituals, classical music, folk songs, blues, pop, songs from musicals and opera, African chants, as well as her own compositions.

On stage, she was a Diva celebrated. Off stage, she was searching. She was unhappy, resentful of audiences who clamored for her jazz and blues tunes instead of refined classical music. Secretly, she looked at the music she sang as common, even trashy, something to be tolerated and given to ignorant audiences who knew nothing better. She felt her music stood for nothing, that her life stood for nothing. She provided escapism instead of meaning.

All that would change because of the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. Suddenly, a black man was speaking publicly about her life and the lives of her black sisters and brothers. King was naming a truth and proposing a dream. Could she, Nina Simone, also name that truth and claim a dream? Could her voice be used to sing, not just jazz, but to sing of the truth of her people? Could she sing of shocking images? Could she sing of southern trees bearing strange fruit: the bodies of black men, beaten and lynched, hung by the neck to swing in the steamy night air.

Southern trees
Bearing strange fruit
Blood on the leaves
And blood at the roots
Black bodies
Swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin'
From the poplar trees
Pastoral scene
Of the gallant south
Them big bulging eyes
And the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia
Clean and fresh
Then the sudden smell
Of burnin' flesh
Here is a fruit
For the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather
For the wind to suck
For the sun to rot
For the leaves to drop
Here is
Strange and bitter crop

"Strange Fruit"
By Lewis Allen and Sonny White

And then, things exploded. On June 11th, 1963, Medgar Evers—field secretary for the NAACP and a early leader of the civil rights movement was shot to death on the steps of his home in Jackson Mississippi. It got worse three months later, Nina Simone recalls:

“I was sitting there in my den on September 15th when the news came over the radio that somebody had thrown dynamite into the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama while black children were attending a Bible class. Four of them—Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins—had been killed. Later that day, in the rioting that followed, Birmingham police shot another black kid and a white mob pulled a young black man off his bicycle and beat him to death, out in the street. It was more than I could take: all the truths that I had denied to myself for so long rose up and slapped my face. The bombings of the little girls in Alabama and the murder of Medgar Evers were like the final pieces of a jigsaw that made no sense until you had fitted the whole thing together. I suddenly realized what it was to be black in America in 1963. It came as a rush of fury, hatred and determination. In church language, the Truth entered me and I ‘came through.’

“I had it in my mind to go out and kill someone. My husband found me trying to make a zip gun in the living room. He didn’t try to stop me, but just stood there for a while and said, “Nina, you don’t know anything about killing. The only thing you’ve got is music.’ The idea of fighting for the rights of my people, killing for them if it came to that, didn’t disturb me too much—even back then I wasn’t convinced that non-violence could get us what we wanted. But my husband was right: I knew nothing about killing and I did know about music. I sat down at my piano. An hour later I came out of my apartment with the sheet music for “Mississippi Goddam’ in my hand. It was my first civil rights song, and it erupted out of me quicker than I could write it down. I knew then that I would dedicate myself to the struggle for black justice, freedom and equality under the law for as long as it took, until all our battles were won. My music was [now] dedicated to a purpose more important than a classical music’s pursuit of excellence; it was dedicated to the freedom and the historical destiny of my people.”

Picket lines
School boy cots
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
for my sister my brother my people and me

Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie

Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You're all gonna die and die like flies
I don't trust you any more
You keep on saying "Go slow!"
"Go slow!"

But that's just the trouble
"do it slow"
Desegregation
"do it slow"
Mass participation
"do it slow"
Reunification
"do it slow"
Do things gradually
"do it slow"
But bring more tragedy
"do it slow"
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it
I don't know
I don't know

You don't have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

"Mississippi Goddam"
By Nina Simone,1963

Unwilling to go slow, Nina channeled her rage into her performing, igniting the spirit of audiences at protest rallies, marches, and concerts. She sang "We Shall Overcome" at Martin Luther King's side on many of the great civil rights marches of the 1960s. She became the greatest singing voice of the civil rights movement. "That's what separated Nina from the other singers," jazz concert promoter George Wein said, "Nina took civil rights and the movement, the fight, to another level, and made it part of her persona." She burned with the idea of a massive revolution in America, a revolution to be launched by African Americans and spread to every minority group.

There was a great price to pay for such militancy. There were nights when she slept in hotel rooms on the floor, to avoid bullets shot through her windows, even as Federal marshals, with rifles, guarded her door.

She watched her heroes Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X be murdered for refusing to go slow and silent.

On the day Martin Luther King was murdered, race riots swept across America, 38 black protestors were killed, and 20,000 people were arrested. And then, for Nina Simone, the civil rights movement fell apart. She wrote: “[With King and Malcolm gone, the true push for lasting change died,] The movement’s most talented members were dead, or exiled or imprisoned and the rest were arguing among themselves. The anti-Vietnam war movement distracted most of the white liberal support we had left. Every black political organization of importance had been infiltrated by the FBI. Police terrorized our communities. The days when revolution really had seemed possible were gone forever. I watched the survivors run for cover in community and academic programmes and felt betrayed, partly by our own leaders but mostly by white America. I had presumed we could change the world. And that was the end for me.”

Will the murders never cease?
Are they men or are they beast?
What do they ever hope,
ever hope to gain?
Will my country fall, stand or fall?
Is it to late for us all?
And did Martin Luther King
just die in vain?

"Why (The King of Love Is Dead)"
By Nina Simone

Nina Simone left America at the end of the 1960s, claiming that both the FBI and the CIA had files on her and she could no longer stand the racism or the danger. At the time of this self-imposed exile, she was enjoying the most commercially successful period of her career.

Six years ago, she was asked: “Do you think the state of race relations in the U.S. is hopeless?” She replied: “I think it's hopeless for the majority of black people. I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don't think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die . . . from violence and from being poor and trying to survive. I think it may be too late. Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking. Desegregation is a joke. I believed that at one time it was possible to change the race problem. I believed that it was possible for Martin Luther King to become president, for Jesse Jackson to become president. But I don't believe that anymore. I left [America] because I didn't feel that black people were going to get their due, and I still don't.”

Disillusioned, she lost her home, she lost her country, she lost her family, she lost her money, she lost her sense of self, and she lost a reason to make music. For the next twenty-five years Nina Simone moved restlessly around the globe, living in Barbados, Liberia, Egypt, Turkey, Holland, Switzerland, and France.

When she died in April of 2003, she was still offering concerts, mostly out of the need for money, but also out of her search, an endless spiritual search, to find the meaning and the message of her life.

Let that, along with her songs, be her legacy. May we pick up her song, and sing it in our own way, in our own voices. May we sing and speak and live the words that will rebuild our world with equality for all people. And may we search for the answers that Nina Simone never found. May we ask ourselves, and never, never stop asking ourselves: How do we sustain our hope in the face of so much that seems broken? How do we sustain our passion for caring and equality, how do we sustain, day after day, year after year, our capacity for changing the world and its evil, ignorance, and violence?” How do we go on in the face of life’s disappointments and harsh realities? How do we avoid burning out and walking away?”

Mike Palter, an internationally acclaimed Jazz singer and my dear friend, said in tribute to Nina Simone: “It’s not really necessary to tell you her story. It was written all over her face. [It was written all over her music] In later years, when she became angrier with her audiences, and with her friends, they forgave her, mostly. They knew that she had her reasons; they knew that she had stood for something.”

She was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon. The world knew her as Nina Simone. And hers was a voice of jazz. Hers was a voice of blues. Hers was a voice of soul. Hers was a voice of justice. Hers was the voice of a generation.

And I sing because I know
I would see you
I sing because I know
I would see you
And I sing because I know
I would see you to be free.

"I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel"
By Richard Lamb, William Taylor