Short History Of... - Nina Simone

Episode Date: August 30, 2026

Nina Simone was not only renowned for her powerful, groundbreaking music; she also became an icon of the civil rights movement at a crucial point in its evolution. And while she lived with the spotlight of fame trained firmly upon her, she struggled to keep her tempestuous personal life out of the public eye. How did she use her bountiful talent to become a champion of political causes? Why did she ultimately spend so much of her life in self-imposed exile? And how much did private struggle impact her role as a public figure and her personal search for happiness? This is a Short History Of Nina Simone. A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Alan Light, a music journalist and author of the biography What Happened, Miss Simone? Written by Dan Smith | Produced by Kate Simants | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Matt Peaty | Sound design by Oliver Sanders | Assembly edit by Dorry Macaulay | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | Fact check: Sean Coleman Unlock the next two episodes of Short History Of… right now by subscribing to Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network, including Real Survival Stories and Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. Just click the subscription banner at the top of the feed, or head to www.noiser.com/subscriptions to get started. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. Your playlist might get you through the workday, but have you ever wondered how your ancestors spent theirs?

What work helped them build a life? How did they adapt as the world around them changed? With Ancestry, you can search Select Historical Occupational Records for free for a limited time and discover the stories behind the jobs in your family tree. You've got questions. We've got ancestors. Search free until August 31st. Visit Ancestry.ca for details. Terms apply. It is a Sunday in the spring of 1943.

At the library in Trium, a tiny town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, around 200 locals are filing in to take their seats, ready for an extraordinary piano recital. Against a backdrop of light chatter and the clearing of throats, 10-year-old Eunice Weyman, wearing a new white dress, nervously fingers the curtain of the edge of the stage. Peering out into the crowd, she sees her mother and father sat on the front row and smiles as they spot her and wave.

But now one of the attendants bends down to whisper something to her parents. Looking confounded, her mother gathers her possessions, and then, after a sigh, her father does the same. Their led to seats further back, and two new arrivals are ushered to the spaces they have just vacated. Eunice frowns. Have her black parents really been told to make way for two white audience members? There and then she makes a decision. She ushers over her piano teacher, asking her to tell the library staff that she will not perform unless her parents are restored to their front row position. Still, the auditorium fills up, but Eunice is serious about following through on her threat.

reluctantly someone in charge gives way there is the scraping of chairs as mr and mrs wayman are returned to their seats and the two white spectators are moved elsewhere satisfied Eunice makes the short walk to the piano she sits down and arranges her music taking time so as to let the audience quiet just as her teacher has taught her she stretches her fingers and then when there is respectful silence begins to play

Her audience enraptured, she is transported to a world where her race is meaningless. The only thing that matters is the magic that pours from her hands. This afternoon is the first time that this little girl has used her artistry as a weapon against prejudice. It will not, however, be the last. Eunice goes on to become famous around the world as Nina Simone, the so-called High Priest's of soul, whose intense performances blended elements of classical, jazz, blues, and folk. But as well as being renowned for her powerful, groundbreaking music, she became an icon of the civil rights movement at a crucial point in its evolution. And while she lived with the spotlight

of fame trained firmly upon her, she struggled to keep her tempestuous personal life out of the public eye. But how did she use her bountiful talent to become a champion of political causes? Why did she ultimately spend so much of her life in self-imposed exile from her homeland? And how much did private struggle impact her role as a public figure and her personal search for happiness? I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is a short history of Nina Simone. It is 1936. And in a small clapboard house in Tryon, three-year-old Eunice Weyman sits on a stool at the family's upright piano.

her feet dangling high above the ground as her tiny hands jump across the keys. Her mother, Mary Kate, a Methodist preacher, stops what she is doing to listen. Surely it can't be. But despite never having had a formal lesson, her daughter is playing a fully formed tune, a hymn they sing at church, and she is playing it beautifully. It dawns on Mary Kate that Eunice has a rare gift. Eunice Kathleen Weyman, the sixths of eight children, is a happy child. But life is hard for the family, and money is short.

Though their hometown is more liberal than many other parts of the American South, this is a hard time to be black. Alongside lynchings by white supremacists, the so-called Jim Crow laws segregate the population, denying African-Americans the right to vote, and reinforcing often extreme economic hardship, along racial lines. Struggling in the grip of the Great Depression,

Mary Kate is the breadwinner, bringing an income through cleaning and domestic work alongside her preaching. Her husband, John, tries his hand at a number of jobs, including working as a handyman, barber, entertainer, as well as being the family joker. Alan Light is a music journalist and author of the biography, What Happened, Miss Simone?

Her mother, I think she sort of idolized, but felt was at a certain distance. Her father, she was much closer to, certainly much more physical proximity with, but knew that he was a flawed individual who couldn't really keep a regular job. Though their homes are a series of properties that sometimes lack even an outhouse,

theirs is a cheerful, musical household. Encouraged by her parents, Eunice learns to play the piano completely by ear. Then, in 1939, when she is seen, six, she accompanies a community choir at a concert in town. In the audience are two white women, Mrs. Miller, who employs Mary Kate as a cleaner, and Muriel Mazanovitch, a local piano teacher. They convince Mary Kate that Eunice needs formal lessons.

Here is somebody who can break out of and escape and has this talent that's going to take her beyond the limitations of being in a small town, the limitations of being black at that time and in that location in America that she had this superpower that if it could be supported, if it could be encouraged, and if it could be genuinely given an outlet, really represented the chance to ascend

in a way that others were not able to do. Each Saturday, Eunice walks three miles for an hour-long lesson with Mrs. Mazzanovitch who rewards her good playing with candies. Literally, crossing the railroad to attend her lessons she is getting a taste of what life has to offer to those born on the other side of the tracks. She becomes familiar with all the classical greats, but it is Bach whom she most adores, finding an almost mathematical beauty in his music.

After four years, she is about to start high school when Mazanovich establishes a community fund so that Eunice can continue her musical education. The fateful concert at the library, when Eunice threatens not to play, is in fact a reward for the She is sent to a boarding school with this sense of, you're going to go off and be our shining star and carry all the hopes and dreams of this community with you. And the intention is that she's going to go on to conservatory and she's going to become the first great black American female classical piano player. Her life at the school is highly regimented, starting with piano practice in the early hours of the morning. of the morning. By her late teens, her commitment to her musical dream contributes to the collapse of a relationship with a boy from trial. The breakup scars her badly, but her love for the piano

leaves little room for anyone else. In the summer of 1950, she is accepted at New York's prestigious Juilliard School of Music, where she plans to study ahead of the entrance assessment for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She sits the exam in August, and though she is pleased with her performance, She's devastated when she receives a rejection. And she is convinced that it is because she is black and because she is a woman, that she has not offered that spot. Now, going back and looking at the records of the school, there had been black students.

It's not like there was zero precedent. It's not like that had not happened. But it almost doesn't matter. What matters is that that is what she perceived as the thing that happened. Believing her music career is over before it has begun, She takes a job as a photographer's assistant in Philadelphia to help support the family, who have moved to the city to be close to her. But she continues to have piano lessons and works as an accompanist at a vocal studio and later as a music teacher.

But when she hears about paid opportunities for musicians on the New Jersey coast, an idea begins to formulate. Now, aged 21, in June, 1954, she secures a gig at the down-at-heel Midtown Bar and Gris. on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City. But she's fearful of what her mother will say if she finds out she's performing in a place like this where jazz and the blues, the devil's music, is preferred to the classics.

She is sufficiently ashamed that she makes up a new name. She doesn't want anybody to happen to see that Eunice Weyman is playing at this club. It would be seen as beneath her. She chooses Nina, a nod. to a nickname given to her by an old boyfriend, Nina, meaning little girl. And for a surname Simone, in honor of the French actress Simone Signore. Simone turns up at the venue in a ball gown.

It's her first time inside a bar like this. She orders a glass of milk, then gets to work, playing some classical scores, then a few spirituals and other improvised pieces. It's certainly not the usual fare around here. The crowd, at least those sober enough to actually listen, barely know what to make of it. When she finishes, the manager comes over, puffing on a fat cigar, and asks when she is going to start singing. After she explains that's not her thing, he looks her up and down, then gives her an ultimatum. Play and sing, or he'll find someone else. She racks her brain for a few songs she knows well enough,

and the crowd warms up. There is something about her voice. She is a contraltar, the deepest of the female voice types, but alongside the rich, warm tone, there is an emotional rawness, too, almost a conversational intimacy. Combined with her extraordinary skill at the piano, it's a kind of alchemy. Tonight, Nina Simone is born. Over the coming months, her audience finds her, a mix of informed music lovers and hip college kids.

The Midtown becomes the place to go. Simone is slated to play nine till four on her nights with a 15-minute break each hour. Such a marathon should be grueling, but she fills the time easily, playfully improvising and exploring songs, as she thinks about the music in entirely new ways. And that is where the foundation for who she becomes, what she sounds like, what kind of songs she selects, and who she is as a singer, all start to crystallize sort of out of necessity. Now firmly established on the Atlantic City scene,

she lays down a few demo tracks that reach the ears of staff at Bethlehem Records, a minor New York label. In 1957, they invited her to come and record, and she gathers an album's worth of tracks. But with the label in financial disarray, these sessions go unreleased for now. Although she is playing increasingly prestigious venues in Atlantic City, she suffers from loneliness,

and the sense she is drifting. That is, until one evening in 1958, when one of the regulars at the Midtown sweeps in, a white, self-styled beatnik by the name of Donald Ross. By day he is a salesman. touting trinkets for the funfair market, but by night he presents as something rather cooler, the sort of figure you might find hanging out with Jack Kerouac or Alan Ginsberg, or at least Nina thinks so.

Others are less convinced, considering him a chancer and a no-hoper. Nonetheless, before the year is out, the pair marry at the county clerk's office. There are no guests. But as others before them who wed in haste, they soon start to repent at least. and divorce after just a few months. For Simone, it's a chance to reset and she moves to New York. The natural next move is to head to New York into the thriving jazz community, all of the jazz clubs that are there, the jazz labels that are there,

and try to take that step from being a nightclub entertainer into being a recording artist and somebody who plays at the more prestigious and more respected clubs, particularly around Granite Village at that time. That album that Bethlehem Records have been holding back, Little Girl Blue, is at last released. It doesn't worry the charts, but then something strange happens. In May 1959, Simone's rendition of I Loves You Porgy from George and Ira Gershwin's Porgy and Bess starts to get radio play. It is released as a single and becomes her first hit. But while word spreads of her virtuoso talent,

so too do tales of her prickliness. She is notorious for turning up late to concerts and for taking her audience to task. This was not about just being difficult for difficult sake or being a diva, but out of having this sense of herself again, she came from a classical background. To her, you go to see her symphony orchestra play, you're not talking, you're not ordering drinks, you're there to listen.

And that was what she expected of her audience, regardless of the room or the context that it was in. Was that a fair thing to expect? We can argue that, but that is absolutely for her where that was coming from. On one occasion, she arrives at Harlem's famous Apollo theater, but refuses to go on until she's paid. The manager tells her the money is in an envelope sitting on top of the piano. She goes on stage and proceeds to count the cash in front of them before playing a note.

At the end of her performance, she takes a performance. takes a tumble over the piano stool and responds to a ripple of laughter in the stalls by giving her audience a stern talking to. But it's her talent that gets her the real attention. There are TV appearances on programs like the Ed Sullivan Show, which commands an audience of millions, as well as a slot at the legendary Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk.

Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. Your playlist might get you through the workday, but have you ever wondered how your ancestors spent theirs? What work helped them build a life? How did they adapt as the world around them changed? With Ancestry, you can search select historical occupational records for free for a limited time and discover the stories behind the jobs in your family tree.

You've got questions. We've got ancestors. Search free until August 31st. Visit Ancestry.ca for details. Terms apply. With the live album of the Newport concert making the Billboard charts, by now Simone is a fixture in Manhattan's thriving, cultural scene, and especially in Greenwich Village. This is a time where Miles Davis is playing, Thelonelius Monk is playing, John Coltrane is playing. We're now in the late 50s into the early 60s. There's this explosion of incredible music that's being made and of this generation of

black intellectuals who are sort of bouncing between Harlem and the village and pushing each other in a lot of ways. Writing poetry, Lorraine Hansberry becomes the first black woman to have a play on Broadway. all of the things that are happening, all of the experiments that are happening in music, but also bouncing off of music and into all these other creative figures. She finds herself in the middle of this hotbed of creativity and intellect and activism in New York City is just drinking it all in, doing the readings, listening to the debates, having the debates, and trying to find the spot for her within all of the things that are going.

New York is not subject to the same Jim Crow laws of the South, but the sense of dissatisfaction among the city's black population is more intensely expressed here than Simone has ever experienced before. Even if not enshrined in law, life is still intrinsically stacked against people of color, and it's within the city's extraordinary cultural environment that the growing frustration finds an outlet. It does not take long for her to be accepted into this new world. Alongside Hansbury, others in her circle include the pioneer of jazz poetry Langston Hughes and James Baldwin, the celebrated author, playwright, and essayist whose works explore themes of race, class, and sexuality. Simone also becomes close to Stokely Carmichael, a leading light of the black power movement

that emerges from mainstream civil rights activism, opposing its non-violent methods and calling for a more dynamic form of black self-determination. She may not be much of a campaigner herself, yet, but the influence of those around her is starting to rub off on her. Because she is doing something that is so different and so uniquely her own, and the people who embrace that, particularly these figures, Lorraine Hansbury, the writer and playwright, becomes really a mentor for Nina and makes her start thinking more about social issues, about political issues, about the role of an artist within the society, within the culture. 1961 proves a pivotal year for Simone, professionally and personally.

In March, she is playing at a Midtown suburb club when she meets Detective Andrew Stroud of the New York Police Department. There is instant chemistry, and within a few months he proposes to her. In a complicated life, there are a lot of complicated pieces, and one of those is her second marriage to Amanda and Andrew Stroud, who was a cop, who was a detective in Manhattan, in the Harlem area, sort of a wash-buckling sort of a figure, somebody who was known to jump in and bust heads when need be

and flashing in his way, sort of a superstar neighborhood cop, who also operated around the fringes of the entertainment industry had relationships there, had a sense of himself as a part of that. Now, married, she joins a trip to Nigeria, organized by the American Society of African Culture. Her first trip to the continent, it influences her enormously. The culture is later reflected in her fashion choices and hairstyles and the adoption of more African themes and rhythms in her music.

Back in the US, she and Stroud find their dream home in the New York suburb of Mount Vernon, fast becoming a hub for upwardly mobile African Americans. In 1962, a daughter, Lisa, arrives. Now Simone has the career, the family, the home, and yet contentment continues to elude her, not least because her marriage is already losing its luster. With Stroud stepping away from his career in the police, he adopts the role of both husband and manager. It is easy to understand in some ways why she would want somebody representing her who could be an intimidating figure, right, who could go in and be commanding

be demanding and go get her good deals and go fight for her to get TV bookings and get listened to because he had that kind of voice, he had that kind of personality. As he pushes to develop her career, their relationship becomes increasingly fraught, hallmarked by domestic abuse. Simone reports many instances of serious violence,

some acknowledged by Stroud himself. There were doors that were open because Andrew Stroud was working with her. There were doors that were closed because Andrew Stroud was working with her. And those things start to spill back into their relationship as well, that he wants things to go the way he wants them to go. She gets frustrated with him.

These are explosive personalities. And certainly from her accounts, this becomes an abusive relationship. There are frightening stories that she tells of the physical abuse that he subjected her to. Nonetheless, on April 12, 1963, she ticks off another of her dreams. to play solo at Carnegie Hall, New York's legendary concert venue since the 1890s. Though she's appeared here before, supporting other artists, notably the South African superstar Miriam McCabe, this time it's all about her, an affirmation of both her brilliant talent and her

explosion in popularity. Yet there is a tinge of regret, too. In a letter to her parents, she writes, I'm finally in Carnegie Hall, but I'm not playing Bach. It's just the first of what becomes a series of appearances here, spawning live albums that help secure her legend. However, events far beyond her control are about to set her on a new and extraordinary artistic path. 1963 is the year the Civil Rights Movement reaches a new intensity. A thousand miles away from Carnegie Hall, down in Birmingham, Alabama, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. is spearheading a series of non-violent protests that lead to tense standoffs with the authorities. In the White House, John F. Kennedy addresses the nation in June to introduce new legislation

designed to end segregation in public spaces and guaranteeing black voting rights. Just hours later, Medgar Evers, a leading figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is gunned down on his own driveway in Jackson, Mississippi. there is more to come. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto

for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca. I'm Julie Andrews, and it is my great pleasure to return to Jane Austen Stories. This time I'll be reading another beloved classic Emma.

Join me as we step into the village of Highbury, home to the handsome and clever Emma Woodhouse. But as new visitors arrive and quiet mysteries unfold, what will our strong-willed heroine learn, both of the secrets of others and of her own heart's desires. Listen to Jane Austen stories now wherever you get your podcasts. September the 15th, 1963, is a bright and clear Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama. Twelve-year-old Sarah Collins is with two of her sisters, Adie Mae and Janie. They're taking their time walking along the traffic-strewn roads, in no particular rush to get to Sunday school.

They throw Janie's purse between themselves in a game of catch until their destination rears into view. The 16th Street Baptist Church is an impressive red brick edifice with domed towers and a cupola. The girls skip up the wide staircase that leads to the main entrance, as worshippers spill into the main sanctuary area, a buzz with chatter. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a regular preacher here. although not today. It is just three weeks since he gave his I Have a Dream speech in Washington

in front of a quarter of a million marches, adding wind to the sales of the activists within the local community. When Janie goes off to her class, Sarah sticks with Addie, two years her senior. They don't much like their Sunday school teacher who has a habit of embarrassing them for their family's poverty.

The pair sneak downstairs to the washrooms. Sarah turns on the taps of the sink while Addie sits on a couch underneath the window. It is just after 20 past 10. Soon the door creaks open and three more girls join them. Two 14-year-olds Carol and Cynthia and 11-year-old Denise. They are chatting happily. Denise helping Addie to retie the sash on her dress when suddenly the room shudders, the windows implode. When Sarah opens her eyes, it is as if she's been transported to a war zone. A seven-foot hole has been blasted into the external wall. Bewildered and breathless with shock, the twelve-year-old looks for the others. Somehow she is still

on her feet, but glass shards rain down on her, cutting her face and eyes. She hears a man outside shouting that the church has been bombed and then is vaguely aware of being lifted up and out into the fresh air. An ambulance arrives on the scene and rushes her to hospital, its sirens blaring. As she is about to be taken to theatre for an operation on her eyes, she hears her sister, Janie, who tells her that Addie has injured her back, but will come to visit just as soon as she can. Sarah wants to believe her, but there is no mistaking the choke of tears in her big sister's voice. When Sarah returns from surgery, efforts to save her right eye having failed, she learns the truth. She is the only one of the five

girls to survive the blast. A bomb consisting of a box of perhaps 19 sticks of dynamite had been set behind the wall of the washrooms. Just the latest, in a series of bombings the city has suffered at the hands of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan. Along with the four dead girls, there are a further 20 casualties from among the congregation upstairs. In New York, Simone switches on the radio, and here's the news. Furious, she initially wants revenge, but will later explain that her husband suggests a different approach to channeling her anger.

Nina, Andrew says to her, you can't kill anyone. You are a musician. Do what you do. Nina heard this story and says she sat down and she wrote the song, Mississippi God damn, in 20 minutes, having never written a song before.

Obviously, she knew how songs worked. She had been singing them and lots of different ones and was inside of them. But the spark that that tragedy provided that she responded to instantly, first draft sat down and wrote this song. That was a landmark protest song that just came up in her

and she could not, could not resist, could not refuse. Pulling no punches, the song rages about the agonizing sluggishness of change and includes lines such as, this whole country is full of lies. No longer simply a brilliant interpreter of the words and music of others, she is becoming a vital voice in her own right. Mississippi Goddame is very different from the protest songs that Dylan was writing,

and he was writing these sort of metaphorical, poetic kinds of songs, and they had the impact that they did. She wrote down and named names and places with a title and a chorus that nobody would play on the radio. Nobody was going to circulate a song with Goddame. in the title. But she said, I don't care about that. This is what I feel like and what I have to say.

It's absolutely unfiltered. It's absolutely direct. The song is banned in several states, but to those who agree with her, that only adds to its appeal. From out of nowhere, she has produced what many regard as perhaps the first great civil rights anthem. After Mississippi Goddamn,

more extraordinary songs pour from her, like four women, which uses archetypes of African-American womanhood to explore sex. race, class, and oppression. Her music becomes an unofficial soundtrack to the civil rights movement. Andrew Young, is one of the central figures, went on to become the United States ambassador to the United Nations.

Later in his life, you know, an important figure, he said we would go door to door, trying to find people to sign petitions or come on marches or donate money, and you heard Nina Simone records playing, bind every one of the doors that we knocked on. She was always there. Her music was always there. She plays benefit concerts for organizations,

including the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Then, on the evening of Wednesday March 24, 1965, Simone is at the City of St. Jude Campus in Montgomery, Alabama. On a makeshift stage, constructed from empty coffin crates from a local funeral home, she performs a breathtaking rendition of Mississippi Goddam as part of a concert marking the landmark Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery. The following day, tens of thousands complete the march, a demonstration of non-violent mass action. But it's only been a month since the assassination of prominent black nationalist and former Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X.

And just like he was, Simone is skeptical about how far non-violence will take the cause. As she tells the story, or as he tells the story, she meets Martin Luther King and says to him, Dr. King, it's an honor to meet you, but I just want you to know, I am not non-violent. She, from the beginning, presents herself with a sensibility that is different from the philosophy that Dr. King is advocating. Then, on the 4th of April, 1968, the world learns that King has been assassinated as he stood on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. Three days later, at New York's Westbury Music Fair, she debuts a new song, Why the King of Love is Dead. As well as a tribute to King, it serves as a characteristic challenge. to consider what needs to be done next.

I choose to reflect the times and the situations in which I find myself. That to me is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don't think you can help to be involved. The tragedy of King's death increases her sense that the forward march of the civil rights movement is dwindling. Others in her close New York circle are also gone.

Lorraine Hansbury dead from cancer at just 34, and Langston Hughes from medical complications while in surgery. Simone co-writes to be young, gifted and black in tribute to Hansbury, the title referencing one of her old friend's own plays. It becomes another of the keynote songs for those immersed in the civil rights fight. Yet for all her importance to America's black society, mainstream success is still elusive. Several of her songs are a refused airplay, while TV bookers often run scared of this political figure with a reputation for being difficult to handle. There are stories, too, of her abuse of alcohol and narcotics, although where truth and exaggeration lie in this regard is often hard to reckon. More certain is that she is,

often deliberately, an uncomfortable act for audiences and venue owners alike. Her shows, gain a reputation for being sometimes unbearably raw and chaotic, notable for long improvisations and sporadic rants. The truth is her mood changes from day to day and moment to moment, and no one ever knows quite what to expect from her. Her refusal to fit herself neatly into artistic pigeonholes can also work against her. What Nina Simone was doing really was unclassifiable. She was playing folk songs.

She was playing children's songs. was playing blues. She was playing eventually songs by pop writers. She was playing Leonard Cohen songs and Bob Dylan and Beatles songs. And then she would turn around and do Southern Children's Ring Game song. And then she would do something from Broadway and musical theater. And it was never clear what you would call the music that Nina Simone made. And that's a real challenge in the music industry. With her commercial success stagnating, strains in her marriage, come to the fore. By the autumn of 1969, she is ready for a change of scene. She flies to Barbados, leaving her wedding ring on the kitchen table, and when she returns a few weeks later,

she finds the home deserted. Stroud has left her and taken Lisa with him. Their marriage is over, and so too their professional relationship. The following year, she returns to Barbados, this time for a longer stint, embarking on a series of short-term romantic dalliances, including one with Errol Barrow, the country's married Prime Minister. But she cannot outrun her problems back home. For several years, she has withheld tax payments as a protest against continued American involvement in the Vietnam War, and now the IRS are after her.

With her finances in disarray, she is forced to sell her home in Mount Vernon. Reunited with Lisa, she takes a rented apartment in Manhattan. But when a warrant is issued for her arrest, West, she flees once more to the Caribbean. Her friend, Miriam McCabe, helps her formulate a new plan. Effectively, a political exile from her native South Africa, Maccabre has taken to spending prolonged spells in Liberia in West Africa.

Now she persuades Nina to come and visit. It offers her the chance of a fresh start. When she arrives in the country, she quickly feels at home. Monrovia, the capital, is going through something of a golden age and she hits its nightlife hard. She has only been in town a few days when she ends up in a small private nightclub maze on the city's main party drag. Around 50 members of Monrovia's elite are crammed inside, beautiful people sharply dressed, shimmering under the lights of a disco ball. It's around midnight when Nina makes her entrance, fizzing like the champagne

she has been knocking back. The dance floor is is alive with the sound of Motown and soul grooves. The music takes her over, and with her head thrown back, she undoes the buttons on her dress and proceeds to dance the night away, semi-naked. Whether it's a demonstration of the liberation she feels out here, or indicative of someone struggling to keep herself under control, is up for debate. When she wakes the following day, it is to the news that word of her antics has made it to the president himself.

She is nervous of the repercussions, but she doesn't need to to be. He turns up at the club himself the following night to join in the fun, and she will immortalize her dance at Mays in a song, Liberian Colipsa. For a while, she lives the dream, mixing with the social elite and living in a house on the beach, listening to the lapping of the sea and watching the sunsets. She has a cook, a driver, a gardener, and a place for Lisa in the local American school. It's enough to make her consider staying forever, finding that sense of belonging, she is craved for so long. But as the months roll into years,

old frustrations emerge. She goes to Africa and has this sort of epiphany of being in a country on a continent that is so visibly black and would theoretically allow her the freedom to do the things that she wants and she's given this residency in a nightclub a place to be able to perform.

And, you know, it seems idyllic. It seems perfect for her. But of course, she sort of rapidly grows bored and frustrated in Africa as well, because she's used to New York. She's surrounded by this vital community. She's surrounded by the political community, by the activist community. It's a difficult and a frustrating place, but she has a place. She feels so isolated when she is in Africa.

She's still working. She still makes some records, but there's really not a lot of ways to promote those. Her relationship with her daughter reaches breaking point, too. Now, a teenager, Lisa reports being the victim of physical abuse and emotional neglect at the hands of her mother, and eventually returns to the US to live with her father. For the next few years, she and Simone are effectively estranged, and by 1977, the musician is ready to leave Liberia too. This time, it is Europe that calls.

Simone lives variously in the UK, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France. But it is a time of ongoing instability, of short-term relationships to match short-term record deals, and a creative output that is a mix of hit and miss more than ever before. She is restless, she is confused, she is disappointed by ultimately the hands that the world has dealt her. And things get very, very difficult and very dark. She was so driven by artistic purpose, creative purpose through the 60s and into the 70s, that even if she couldn't be the classical artist that she had dreamed of, there was still a sense of mission and a sense of experimentation and exploration in her music.

Merely to keep herself on the rails, she is reliant on the kindness of a small circle of friends, who endeavored to keep her housed, fed, working, and out of trouble as much as possible. She finds supportive audiences in a string of jazz clubs across the continent, perhaps most notably at London's Ronnie Scott's Club. Many of her shows are dynamic, but there are times when her performances falter and she is plagued by bouts of stage fright,

interspersed with tense showdowns with those who have paid to watch her. Any given night might either be a delight or a letdown, such as her capriciousness. The days of taking Carnegie Hall by storm seem a long way off. By this time, her emotional state, her mental state, again, not diagnosed, but what we

certainly in retrospect, think of as her bipolar condition. It's a ticking time bomb. There were sort of limited treatments that people tried, such as the state of the psychological, pharmaceutical research was at the time, but nowhere near where we are now in terms of understanding these things. And so sooner or later, something was going to go wrong, something was going to go bad. In 1985, her increasingly erratic behavior, reaches a crescendo when, angered over unpaid royalties, she pursues a record-label boss

into a Swiss restaurant where she pulls out a gun and shoots at him. Though fortunately failing to hit him, and thus managing to avoid any legal consequences, it seems to encapsulate her spiraling decline. Then, in 1987, she enjoys an unexpected renaissance, in Europe at least. Chanel launches a high-profile advertising campaign in, the region with Simone's, My Baby Just Cares for Me as its theme tune. Thirty years after she recorded it, the track reaches number five in the UK charts and is a top ten hit across the continent. Though it brings limited financial reward, as she signed away her

rights to the recording decades ago, it introduces her to a new generation. The following year she moves to the Netherlands, where she at last receives a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder. In 1992, she appears at Carnegie Hall for the first time since 1971. It's a triumph that rolls back the years and results in a major new record deal. An album, her last, follows in 1993 when she settles in France. Yet if life has taken an upturn as she hits her 60s, it is not without its moments of high drama still.

Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. In July 1995, Nina Simone is sitting in the garden of her unkempt home in the town of Bucbellaire, the song of magpies and jackdores in the air.

Situated to the north of Marseilles, it can feel remote out here. Not the sort of picture postcard place people imagine when they think of the south of France. The electricity and water have both been cut off because Nina hasn't been paying the bills. And she regularly skips the medication meant to keep her mood stable. Today she sits at a table outside, chatting away on the telephone. The teenage son of the family next door also happens to be out, along with a friend, noisy and high-spirited as they splash around in their family swimming pool. Nina talks animatedly on the phone, her characteristically deep tones carrying on the summer breeze.

As she listens to the person on the other end of the line, she becomes increasingly aware of another voice in earshot, a baritone that sounds strained. She tenses. It is coming from over the fence, one of the boys mocking her own voice. She has not struggled to this stage of life to sit back and let a 15-year-old ridicule her. She lifts the receiver away from her ear and bellows towards the neighbor to cut it out. But her demand is met not with respectful silence, but a renewed round of mimicry. She gets up from her chair and goes in search of an air rifle she keeps on the property.

Striding towards the fence, she raises the weapon in both hands and fires off a series of shots. The frivolous uproar from next door gives way to a moment of stunned silence. Nina just has time to be pleased. They're no longer insulting her, before both the boys begin hollering in pain. The youths both recover, but the incident sparks a crisis in her life. A month after the assault, she is brought before the courts,

where she receives an eight-month suspended jail sentence and an order for psychiatric counseling. Only a couple of years later in 1997, she receives a breast cancer diagnosis. But as old age looms, she seems to find a semblance of the peace that has so long eluded her. There is a degree of reconciliation with her daughter, Lisa, and she is once again playing prestigious venues.

In 2002, there is one last concert at Carnegie Hall, the venue that perhaps best maps the ups and downs of her extraordinary career, where she plays alongside Elton John to rapturous acclaim. The following year, now aged 70, she is awarded an honorary doctorate by the Curtis Institute, the Philadelphia establishment that rejected her all those years before. It feels as if a lingering injustice has at last been righted. So you can't really say that there's a happy ending, but I think that by the later years there was a sense that she had certainly gotten out of the darkest places

and the most desperate places of where her life had been during the years that preceded there. On April the 21st, 2003, Nina has some phone calls old friends, then dies peacefully in her sleep at home in France. Over 70 years she lived a life of extraordinary highs and lows, the epitome perhaps of the tortured genius who never followed the career path she dreamed of as a child, but who soundtracked a vital, vibrant, and troubled period of American history. She was an artist who never quite found her place in the world during her own lifetime, but whose importance has arguably become more apparent in death.

The way that Nina was discovered, adopted, translated by more activist artists in the hip-hop world, the fact that she was the icon that Lauren Hill would talk about, the fact that her music was featured so prominently in Kanye's work before the Kanye meltdown and everything else when he was as important to figure in music as there was, and that she, She symbolized a merger of activism and music in this pure way, in this uncompromising way, in a genuinely artistic way. But she was such a paragon of that sense of independence, that sense of absolute commitment, that sense of not being limited by expectation or by genre or by race or anything that, you know, an artist is there to create and to speak truth.

And that means absolutely. that doesn't mean any other version of that. That closed a lot of doors. That capped a lot of ceilings. That ultimately led to an incredibly difficult life. But she's there as an example of what that commitment and that dedication mean. But it is surely right to leave the last word to the woman herself. My thing, what I hope to do all the time, is to be so completely myself, which that's what I hope I am, to be so much myself.

that my audiences and even people who meet me are confronted with what I am, inside and out, as honest as I can be. In this way, they have to see things about themselves. Next time on Short History, we'll bring you a short history of 9-11. I don't think the United States has ever recovered from 9-11. I think it fundamentally rewrote the DNA of our country and our society. It turned the United States into a country that is much more fearful. You know, that innocence of 8.46 a.m. on Tuesday and September the 11th is, I think, at this point, probably gone forever.

That's next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Short History of right now, without waiting and without adverts, by subscribing to Noisa Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description or head to double. www.noiser.com forward slash subscriptions to unlock more episodes today. Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation walk. Challenge yourself, friends and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the

fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca.