WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? 2015

The life and artistry of Nina Simone illuminated in poignant documentary

The best documentaries exist as something more allegorical than the rote, history-lesson cataloging of the biographical details of a public figure’s life. Also, in spite of the vast scope of the subject’s fame and influence, they tend to be more effective when honing in on a selective perspective or point of view. 

In the marvelous What Happened, Miss Simone?, documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus explores the personal and professional life of the legendary jazz/blues/ folk artist by submitting her film as the literal answer to the titular question, one originally asked by author/poet Maya Angelou in a 1970 article penned for Redbook magazine.

Angelou’s interview with Simone coincided with the famed singer/composer/musician's turbulent transformation from jazz concert poet to The High Priestess of Soul in the late 60s. A time when the Civil Rights Movement so significantly influenced her work that she alienated her pop music fan base while simultaneously giving voice and inspiration to the nation’s unsung with her Top 100 single, “Young, Gifted, & Black” ( a song co-written with Weldon Irvine to, as Simone put it, “Make black children all around the world feel good about themselves forever.”).

The question Angelou posed: “Miss Simone, you are idolized, even loved, by millions now. What happened, Miss Simone?” - is tellingly ambiguous and suggest perhaps a contradiction. Is it the typical press agent query, “How did you get to where you are?”, or the more complex and infinitely more painful, “What happened to you in your life to make your music so raw and impassioned?” 

The High Priestess of Soul
(1933 - 2003) 

Garbus’ documentary, co-produced by and currently streaming on Netflix, examines the life of Nina Simone by turning the story of her tumultuous career and private life into a larger examination of what can happen when an artist—an individual devoted to the freest expression of truth—is born into a society which tells them everything they are, everything that comprises their very essence and being, is unworthy of dreams. Unworthy because of the color of their skin. The broadness of their nose. The thickness of their lips. That they are born female. As the film progresses and grows darker than you might expect, the social focus of the opening question morphs into the personal, "How did it come to this?"

As an African-American piano prodigy born in the Jim Crow-era South (“I played the boogie at (age) three and gave concerts at twelve”), Nina Simone, nee Eunice Waymon, was an anomaly in her small North Carolina hometown. Crossing train tracks to the “white” section of town to take piano lessons, practicing so much she barely had a childhood; Simone’s keenly-felt separateness defined her attitude towards both her musical gift and her ambitions.

Simone dreamed big: she wanted more than anything to be the first black female classical pianist to play Carnegie Hall. But when she was turned down by the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and had to take up performing jazz and pop music in clubs, the teenage Simone felt for the first time that most common, but nonetheless soul-killing, of African-American experiences- being certain but never truly knowing if race played a part in her rejection.

Nina Simone graduated valedictorian of her high school class and was awarded
a one-year scholarship at Julliard School of Music in New York

With this, the seeds of rage, self-doubt, and indignation began to take root within her just as firmly as her talents as a singer and musician blossomed. Fueled by an ambition to succeed, blessed with a talent that couldn’t be ignored, yet led by circumstance down a path not wholly of her choosing, Nina Simone’s demons were manifest in the same questions that plagued many frustrated African-Americans in pursuit of the American dream in those nascent civil rights years. The lingering oppression of separatism and Jim Crow led Langston Hughes to pen the 1951 poem, “Harlem.” A poem whose words articulated the conundrum facing all black artists and dreamers in America.

What Happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? 
Or fester like a sore
And then run? 
Does it stink like rotten meat? 
Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Throughout her life, Nina Simone’s mainstream success stood in the shadow of her unrealized dream to be a classical musician. Similarly, the material rewards of her success only reinforced her childhood sense of isolation…a gap she always sought to bridge with her music. Following the 1963 murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and the Alabama church bombing that killed four little girls that same year;  the discrepancy she felt between her quality of life and that of the average black person living in America, altered and politicized her artistic expression.

We witness Nina Simone's transformation from demure, evening-gowned chanteuse playing to an all-white audience on TV's Playboy After Dark, to vibrant political activist joyously singing songs of protest and revolution (No pacifist, she. Simone believed in violent retaliation). The documentary juxtaposes these wildly contrasting professional images with equally at-odds-with-themselves accounts of her stormy private life.

Revolution Evolution

Through interview footage, rare recordings, snippets from her journals, and a mercifully sparse sprinkling of talking head commentary from her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly (the film’s executive-producer), husband /manager Andrew Stroud, and lifelong friends; we learn not only was Simone’s art and life matched in complexity and anguish but that each in many ways grew out of the other.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What Happened, Miss Simone? is gratifying on many levels. As someone who knew of  Nina Simone, but next to nothing about her, this look at her life is quite revelatory. Hats off to director Liz Garbus (Love, Marilyn) for mounting such a clear-eyed portrait of a legendary icon. I also like that it’s a fairly straightforward documentary. Eschewing the contemporary trend toward visual gimmickry and the overuse of showy graphics, What Happened, Miss Simone? deals with its subject in a direct, head-on manner complementary to the great woman herself. Neither hagiography nor hatchet-job, What Happened, Miss Simone? is merely honest. Honest in a way that ultimately proves very real and very moving.

What Happened, Miss Simone? has some exceptional interview footage

*Scary side-note (make that terrifying): Sobering and sad how so much of the film's difficult-to-watch violent footage from the 60s Civil Rights Movement looks like just America in 2015.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Although running a brisk 100 minutes, a major asset of What Happened, Miss Simone? is the amount of time it allocated to footage of Simone performing. Her voice has mesmerized me for years, but it's truly a remarkable experience watching her in action. She's electric and unpredictable. I especially got a charge out of a bit of concert footage showing Simone stopping mid-song to point to and shout authoritatively at someone in the audience, "Hey, girl, sit down!" followed by a loooong unbroken stare and a second demand, "Sit DOWN!" Following a satisfied nod of the head signifying either the patron's compliance or execution, Simone calmly resumes the song at the exact point she left off.
Magnificent! 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

My mother loved Nina Simone and played her records constantly when I was growing up. But as a child, I actually thought Nina Simone’s music was kind of scary. Not scary as in frightening, but somehow deeply sad and troubling in a way I was too young to understand. Of course, in retrospect, I know it was because the songs were too real. They weren't pop, they weren't escapist...they were authentic. Authentic in a way where I must have sensed (in that way kids can) that perhaps in her songs, she was saying things my mom felt, but could never say aloud.

Many years later, when the soundtrack to the 1993 movie, Point of No Return, introduced a whole new generation to Nina Simone (mostly hipsters and yuppies who, like those Playboy penthouse guests of yore, adored black music but black people, not so much), I seemed to listen to her with fresh ears. In place of what I once heard in her voice that scared me I heard the kind of naked self-exposure of a true artist. She wasn't just trying to make pretty sounds or packaging melodies for cocktail party consumption.

She was sharing the dejection of a sensitive, impressionable child told by the country of her birth that she was somehow less valuable, less beautiful, because of her skin. She sang about being a black woman of financial privilege who had to put on a smile and entertain while all around her African-American figures of hope were being killed off, one by one.
She opened up about her frustration in knowing that the more she sang about her personal truth as a black woman, the smaller her audiences would grow. In the midst of this was a woman battling a mental illness, a woman in an abusive relationship who visited that same violence onto her daughter. The dark, the light.
Nina Simone's genius lies in her ability to make poetry out of the contradictory and confounding ugliness and beauty that was her life. That triumph of What Happened, Miss Simone? is that it presents these sometimes unpleasant realities without ever diminishing the artistic legacy of this legendary woman with the soul-searing voice who was rightfully dubbed, The High Priestess of Soul.

PERSONAL FAVORITE NINA SIMONE RECORDINGS
Little Girl Blue (1958)
New World Coming (1971)
Just Like A Woman (1971)

Do What You Gotta Do (1968)
Sunday in Savannah (1968)
Here Comes the Sun (1971)

To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1970)

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2015