The Black Princess

Nina Simone in Life and Music

Feb. 27, 2010

midnight

Nina Simone was a bewitchingly powerful singer,infusing her material with emotional nuance as well as dusky drama. Recordcompanies marketed her in the late 1950s as a jazz singer but as her newbiography spells out, Simone never wanted to be a jazz artist. A classicallytrained pianist, she aspired to Bach more than Bassie. Before long Simonetranscended any label, beating Screaming Jay Hawkins at his own hoodoo gamewith her version of “I Put a Spell on You” and cutting a drop-dead “Don’t LetMe Be Misunderstood” before the Animals got to it. She became wrapped up in theblack struggles of the ‘60s and didn’t suffer fools gladly. “So you’re thehonky who stole my song and got a hit out of it?” she told the Animals’ EricBurdon, who fancied himself a friend of the black man (and especially the blackwoman).

In PrincessNoire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone (Pantheon), biographer NadineCohodas details her subject’s life from its precarious lower middle classorigins in North Carolina through herexpatriate years in Franceand death in 2003. Exhaustingly researched through interviews and contemporarypress accounts of her idiosyncratic career, PrincessNoire follows the singer through a life filled with extraordinaryassociates (Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin), politicalmilitancy, angry tantrums and erratic behavior. By 1970 she was judged as adifficult woman by the music business; even if she had tried to play the game,it’s likely that her increasingly eclectic music would have gotten lost in amarketplace segregated into easily identifiable bins.

If PrincessNoire has a fault, it’s a problem endemic nowadays to writers of weightybiographies. Cohodas chronicles the growth of each tree in Simone’s life withsuch attention that she loses sight of the forest. But as a compendium of thefacts of a fascinating if flawed artist, PrincessNoire will be hard to top.