It's late April but damp and cold as February. The sky is gray. The heat in my crappy apartment has been turned off. I'm out of work and I've just been dumped. These are the times when she whispers to me in that raspy Southern voice of hers.

The music doesn't make me feel any better but I keep listening, crank it up and close my eyes, let Nina Simone do her thang.

I once had a roommate who used to blare the South Pacific soundtrack when times were tough. A friend of mine drunkenly admitted that the Beaches soundtrack was his end all musical therapy. But the music I choose in my moment of need doesn't serve either of these purposes. It doesn't cheer me up and it doesn't allow me to wallow. Nina Simone is much more complex than that. Rather, she hugs me while grabbing me by the proverbial balls. Comfort, pain and just the slightest bit of arousal all at the same time, that's my woman.

But although I claim her, praise jesus that she isn't just mine....

Born Eunice Waymon in 1930 in Tryon, North Carolina, Simone was the sixth of eight children. When Simone was 12 she performed at a prestigious recital. The ushers tried to force her parents to sit in the back row, and Simone got on stage (a preview of the great Civil Rights advocate that she would become) grabbed the microphone and said, ŇOh no you don't, my mum and dad will be sitting in the front row.Ó

After attending Julliard, Simone wanted to be the first black classical pianist. She applied to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia but was denied entrance. She had no doubt that the school based their decision on her race. And so, Simone, like her great predecessors turned to the blues and soul when no other genre would have her.

She adopted songs like Gershwin's "I Love You Porgy" and "Summertime" and not only made them her own, but with her scratchy and distinctive voice, she also reminded us with each note of the black experience, of politics, and racism, of the reason she sang, of the hotels she wasn't allowed to sleep in, and of the schools she couldn't attend. These intense sentiments came through in many of her Civil Rights Era songs. In "Backlash Blues," Simone sings, "You freeze my wages, raise my taxes and send my sons to Vietnam. / You give me second-class houses, second-class schools. / Do you think that all colored people are just second-class fools? / Mr. Backlash, I'm gonna leave you with the blues."

In the 1970's when both critics and fans ostracized Simone for her heightened political stance, the singer left the United States, first for Barbados and Africa and finally the south of France.

"I am sure there was a great anger in her," said Jazz critic John Clare when he heard of her death. This anger Clare talks about however is a different breed than the guitar-smashing, gay-bashing variety we hear in popular music. Simone was a disciple, sent from the heavens of soul and jazz and roots to draw her audience in as if it were her family and by doing this she showed us our country's ugly scars.

In recent years audiences have complained of her "volatility" on stage. But a Nina Simone in a suburban stadium, sedated on Prozac, or some12-step program, a glass of Evian in one hand and a microphone in the other, couldn't exist. For it is only in Simone's brutality that we find humanity.

Political even in her death, Simone's passing has struck a final blow to the country that tried to confine her art; it was no coincidence that the "high priestess of soul" passed peacefully Monday night on French soil. She was 70 years old.

I'll miss you Nina but what a life, goddamn!

(c) Copyright 2003 La Lutta NMC