Nina Simone's Letter to Langston Hughes

Then too, if I'm in a negative mood and want to get more negative (about the racial problem, I mean) if I want to get downright mean and violent I go straight to this book and there is also material for that.



Sometimes when I'm with white "liberals" who want to know hy we're so bitter - I forget (I don't forget - I just get tongue-tied) how complete has been the white race#s rejection of us all these years and when this happens I go get your book.



I know one thing - I've always admired you and been proud of you - respected you and felt honored to know you - but brother, you got a fan now!





images via

A lot of Hell but a Good Time. Nina Simone.

Do you think that your child will be living through the revolutionary years?



"I don't know, love. Whatever it is she's going to have pride in her own blackness. She's going to have a chance to be more than just somebody who's on the outside looking in. Like it's been for most of us, and my parents before me, but she may see more bloodshed than I've ever even dreamed of. I have no way of knowing that evolution. The cycle goes round and round. It's time for us."



"It's a good time for black people to be alive. It's a lot of hell, a lot of violence, but I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life. I have a chance to live as I've dreamed." (via)



photographs via and via and via

Four Women (1966)

"I am emphatically against the injustices of black people, of third world people. 'Four Women' came to me after conversations I had with black women. It seemed we were all suffering from self-hatred. We hated our complexions, our hair, our bodies. I realized we had been brainwashed into feeling this way about ourselves by some black men and many white people. I tried to speak to this in the song. And do you know, some black radio stations wouldn't play it? It is true what they say: the truth hurts."
Nina Simone



"But it was “Four Women,” an instantly accessible analysis of the damning legacy of slavery, that made iconographic the real women we knew and would become. For African American women it became an anthem affirming our existence, our sanity, and our struggle to survive a culture which regards us as anti-feminine. It acknowledged the loss of childhoods among African American women, our invisibility, exploitation, defiance, and even subtly reminded that in slavery and patriarchy, your name is what they call you. Simone’s final defiant scream of the name Peaches was our invitation to get over color and class difference and step with the sister who said:

My skin is brown/My manner is tough/I’ll kill the first mother I see/ My life has been rough/I’m awfully bitter these days/Because my parents were slaves.

For African American women artists of my generation, “Four Women” became the core of works to come (...)".
Thulani Davis



"Ironically, “Four Women” was charged with being insulting to black women and was banned on a couple of radio stations in New York and Philadelphia soon after the recording was released, in 1966. The ban was lifted, however, when it produced more outrage than the song. Simone’s husband, Andrew Stroud, who was also her manager, worried about the dangers that the controversy might have for her career, although this was hardly a new problem. Simone had been singing out loud and clear about civil rights since 1963—well after the heroic stand of figures like Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis, Jr., but still at a time when many black performers felt trapped between the rules of commercial success and the increasing pressure for racial confrontation."
Claudia Roth Pierpont

"'Four Women' was written overnight, but it took me four months before I had the nerve to play it to somebody because I thought it would be rejected. I played it for my husband on an airplane one day; I thought he wasn't going to like it because it was so direct and blatant."
Nina Simone (1984)



“My skin is black,” the first woman’s story begins, “my arms are long.” And, to a slow and steady beat, “my hair is woolly, my back is strong.” Singing in a club in Holland, in 1965, Nina Simone introduced a song she had written about what she called “four Negro women” to a young, homogeneously white, and transfixed crowd. “And one of the women’s hair,” she instructed, brushing her hand lightly across her own woolly Afro, “is like mine.” Every performance of “Four Women” caught on film (as here) or disk is different. Sometimes Simone coolly chants the first three women’s parts—the effect is of resigned weariness—and at other times, as on this particular night, she gives each woman an individual, sharply dramatized voice. All four have names. Aunt Sarah is old, and her strong back has allowed her only “to take the pain inflicted again and again.” Sephronia’s yellow skin and long hair are the result of her rich white father having raped her mother—“Between two worlds I do belong”—and Sweet Thing, a prostitute, has tan skin and a smiling bravado that seduced at least some of the eager Dutch listeners into the mistake of smiling, too. And then Simone hit them with the last and most resolutely up to date of the women, improbably named Peaches. “My skin is brown,” she growled ferociously, “my manner is tough. I’ll kill the first mother I see. ’Cause my life has been rough.” (One has to wonder what the Dutch made of killing that “mother.”) If Simone’s song suggests a history of black women in America, it is also a history of long-suppressed and finally uncontainable anger.
Claudia Roth Pierpont



My skin is black
My arms are long
My hair is woolly
My back is strong
Strong enough to take the pain
inflicted again and again
What do they call me
My name is AUNT SARAH
My name is Aunt Sarah

My skin is yellow
My hair is long
Between two worlds
I do belong
My father was rich and white
He forced my mother late one night
What do they call me
My name is SAFFRONIA
My name is Saffronia

My skin is tan
My hair is fine
My hips invite you
my mouth like wine
Whose little girl am I?
Anyone who has money to buy
What do they call me
My name is SWEET THING
My name is Sweet Thing

My skin is brown
my manner is tough
I'll kill the first mother I see
my life has been too rough
I'm awfully bitter these days
because my parents were slaves
What do they call me
My name is PEACHES

(lyrics via)



Related postings:
- The day Nina Simone's skin grew a little more black: LINK
- The Backlash Blues: LINK
- Nina Simone: LINK

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photographs via and via

The Backlash Blues

"Backlash Blues" is one of Nina Simone's civil rights songs. The lyrics were written by poet, novelist and social activist James Mercer Langston Hughes who was one of the most important thinkers of Harlem Renaissance and a close friend of Nina Simone's (via).



Mr. Backlash, Mr. Backlash
Just who do think I am
You raise my taxes, freeze my wages
And send my son to Vietnam

You give me second class houses
And second class schools
Do you think that alla colored folks
Are just second class fools
Mr. Backlash, I'm gonna leave you
With the backlash blues

When I try to find a job
To earn a little cash
All you got to offer
Is your mean old white backlash
But the world is big
Big and bright and round
And it's full of folks like me
Who are black, yellow, beige and brown
Mr. Backlash, I'm gonna leave you
With the backlash blues

Mr. Backlash, Mr. Backlash
Just what do you think I got to lose
I'm gonna leave you
With the backlash blues
You're the one will have the blues
Not me, just wait and see

Nina Simone



The song:
::: Backlash Blues (Montreaux, 1976): WATCH/LISTEN
::: Backlash Blues (Paris, 1968): WATCH/LISTEN



The following text was also written by Langston Hughes (for the liner notes to Nina Simone's album "Broadway-Blues-Ballads).

The One and Only Nina Simone, a tribute by Langston Hughes:

She is strange. So are the plays of Brendan Behan, Jean Genet, LeRoi Jones, and Bertold Brecht.

She is far out, and at the same time common. So are raw eggs in Worcestershire and the CONNECTION.

She is different. So was Billie Holiday, St. Francis, and John Donne. So is Mort Sahl. So is Willie Mays.

She is a club member, a colored girl, an Afro-American, a homey from Down Home. She has hit the Big Town, the big towns, the LP discs and the TV shows–and she is still from down home. She did it mostly all by herself. Her name is Nina Simone.

She has a flair, but no air. She has class, but does not wear it on her shoulders. Only chips. She is unique. You either like her or you don’t. If you don’t, you won’t. If you do–wheee-ouuu-eu! You do!

Some folks never did learn to like Billie Holiday. Some folks don’t like Eartha Kitt. To some Edith Piaf never meant peanuts. To others Mabel Mercer could come for free, and Jackie Mabley is not worth a dime. Bert Williams may be drug your mama and Valida Snow your papa. Tastes differ. For some tastes Ethel Waters was and Pearl Bailey is, Bing Crosby was and Frank Sinatra is, George Walker was and Sammy Davis is. But Elvis, No! Ornette Coleman, not Barbara Dane, not Jacob Lawrence, never! And don’t mention Lotte Lenya.

Everybody has a right to like whoever he likes and whatever he likes in life and in the arts. Some folks in religion like the Rev. Howard Thurman, some like Father Divine, others prefer Benjamin Mays and some Mother Horne. In literature many read Frank Yerby and some read James Baldwin.

In politics some like Goldwater and some like Nasser. In food some like chitterlings, some caviar.

In entertainment some like Nipsey Russell, some like Charles Aznavour, some like Dorothy Donegan, and some like Nina Simone.

Why should anyone like her because she plays piano well? So do lots of other people. But she plays piano FLUIDLY well, SIMPLY well, COMPLICATEDLY well, THEATRICALLY well, DRAMATICALLY well, INDIVIDUALLY well, and MADLY well. Not just WELL.

Why should one like Nina Simone because she sings a song differently? Plenty of singers sing songs differently. But many singers strain so hard to be different, pay arrangers so much money to make their songs sound different, but have no convictions themselves about what they are singing, and so seem hollow, artificial, fake, and wrong when they sing a song. Nina Simone is as different as beer is from champagne, crackers from crepes suzettes, Eastland from Adam Powell, Houston from Paris– each real in their way, but Oh! how different– and how fake it is if it is not Houston you want but the “city of light.”

The letters l-i-v-e that spell LIVE mean exactly the same as the letters N-i-n-a that spell NINA. As for that word SIMONE–be cool, Jack, be cool! And listen to this album.

Langston Hughes

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Related postings:
- The day Nina Simone's skin grew a little more black
- Nina Simone

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photographs of Nina Simone (BBC TV Centre, 1968, by David Redfern) via and via and via, copyrights by the respective owners

The day Nina Simone's skin grew a little more black

Nina Simone, born Eunice Waymon, had her first town recital when she was eleven years old. Her parents came to watch their daughter play. They had, in fact, been there rather early to make sure that they did not miss her recital and sat in the front row .... only to be asked to give up their front row seats to a white family. Little Eunice at the piano stood up and refused to play.
It was her first concert and it was the very day she became aware of racism for the first time. To her it was like "switching on a light". Her parents were allowed to keep their seats but it was too late to make them stop feeling embarrassed. Eunice Waymon felt "cut raw" yet "the skin grew back again a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black." (Loudermil, 2013)



Related posting: Nina Simone

More Nina Simone:
::: Stars & Feelings (Montreaux 1976 Jazz Festival): WATCH/LISTEN
::: Sinner Man (Montreaux 1976 Jazz Festival): WATCH/LISTEN




- Fluch, K. (2016) Das Tremolo des Widerstands. Gerechter Zorn, ewige Kunst: Das Boxset "Nina Simone. The Philips Years", Der Standard, 23. Juli 2016, S. 20
- Loudermilk, A. (2013) Nina Simone & the Civil Rights Movement: Protest at Her Piano, Audience at her Feet. Journal of International Women#s Studies, 14(3), 121-136.
- photographs via and via and via

Nina Simone

Nina Simone (1933-2003), one time Grammy Hall of Fame Award winner and fifteen times nominee, became involved in the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Civil rights messages became an integral part of her songs - the first time with "Mississippi Goddam", a song that was boycotted in some southern states, (via) a song she had written in response to the assassination of the civil rights activist Medgar Evers (1925-1963) and the Birmingham church bombing in 1963 (via).



Recently, her biography - or rather the casting decision for the film "Nina" - caused some controversy. The Afro-Latina actress of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent Zoe Saldana was chosen to play Nina Simone. Some criticised the fact that Saldana would barely resemble Simone (via), that Hollywood would "whitewash and lightwash" and choose what media considers blackness to be. An online petition followed to change the cast and replace Saldana (via). The petition was signed by more than 10.000 people (via). When photos of Zoe Saldana were published wearing an afro wig and darker makeup in order to resemble Simone and to be able to play her role, accusations of blackface and parody followed (via).
Nina Simone's daughter: "My mother was raised at a time when she was told her nose was too wide, her skin was too dark. Appearance-wise this is not the best choice." (via)