July 12, 2014 She was known as the high priestess of soul, but the late American singer Nina Simone, adored for her hits of the Fifties and Sixties such as My Baby Just Cares For Me, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood and I Put a Spell on You, was a hugely troubled figure. She battled depression and alcoholism, and had a tortured relationship with her only child, Lisa.
‘My mother could be a monster,’ says Lisa, talking for the first time about life with Nina.
‘I was not a happy child when I was alone with her. 'My mum shot me down a lot, attacked me in public. It is easy to attack children, they are small and depend on you.’ Throughout her life Lisa, a professional singer and musician, was dragged across the world by her mother.
When she complained or refused, she was blackmailed and beaten. It is a mark of her erratic and peripatetic life that she had 13 governesses by the age of seven, was working at ten and was her mother’s chauffeur by 12. She walked out at 14 after a beating. Nina refused to support her career in the U.S. Air Force or her entry into music, and disinherited Lisa from her will.
‘I’d like to think if she had taken two seconds to think about her behaviour she would have done things differently but I’m not sure. 'My mother was angry with the world and often the only person around to blame was me. Throughout her life Lisa was dragged across the world by her mother. 'When my parents were together my mother was more giving and open but with the divorce she turned into someone you didn’t want to know. 'I had nothing to do with my father before his death.’ That father, Andy Stroud, who Nina married in 1961, died in 2012. A former detective, he was a muscular, handsome but violent man who set himself up as Nina’s manager in the Sixties and kept her in line with beatings.
Simone’s life is now the subject of an eagerly anticipated Hollywood biopic, Nina, starring Zoe Saldana.
It was due out in March, but the release date was postponed when writer and director Cynthia Mort became locked in a protracted legal dispute with the producers. Mort says she’s been cut out of the final editing process and is demanding to be reinstated. Even in death, it seems, the life of Nina Simone remains the subject of intense controversy.
Born Eunice Way-mon in America’s Deep South, Nina was a child prodigy whose parents were determined to realise her ambition of becoming the first black concert pianist. Denied a place at a distinguished white music school, Simone would craft what she called ‘black classical music’, a mix of jazz, gospel, blues, folk and soul. During the Sixties, Simone, who had seen how racists made her parents sit at the back of the hall during her early recitals, would become an icon to the civil rights movement, although she clashed with Martin Luther King over his non-violent approach to reform.
She channelled her anger into songs such as Mississippi Goddam, composed in response to the killing of a black man in 1963, and Four Women, which deals with the issue of how black women are treated in society. During the Sixties, Nina would become an icon to the civil rights movement. In 1970, with the peak of her career behind her, Nina and Lisa fled from the abusive Stroud for Barbados, where Nina began an affair with the married Prime Minister Errol Barrow. When Barrow discarded the tempestuous and impoverished singer, her daughter felt the consequences.
‘I got my first job in Barbados. I was ten or 11, old enough to file papers. I had no option.’ Nina lost her home and control of her business affairs after court battles with the U.S. Inland Revenue Service. Her response was to move to Liberia at the invitation of exiled South African musical icon Miriam Makeba. Lisa remembers Liberia’s capital Monrovia as a rare oasis of stability – as long as her mother was absent.
‘It was one of the happiest periods of my life’, she says. ‘I went to school there and I lived with a surrogate family. But then my mother decided to join me and it went downhill. ...
The contrast with Nina couldn’t be sharper. ‘I have been married 18 years, I have a good relationship with my children and I hope I’ll get to die with a smile on my face surrounded by my family. 'My mother never got that. She passed away still in search of comfort and love. Perhaps if she had them, she might, in the end, have known peace.’
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Posted By: Jeni Fa
Tuesday, July 15th 2014 at 6:58PM
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