August 2, 2026

I did not know that Nina Simone was a classically trained pianist, not that she was declined entry into a conservatory in New York - not because of her lack of skill but because of her skin pigmentation. I don't suppose that should have surprised me, but that New York in the 1950s was still that bigoted is pretty shameful. She didn't just take that slight lying down though, and was soon working nightly in a jazz club demonstrating that she was a … read the rest.

I did not know that Nina Simone was a classically trained pianist, not that she was declined entry into a conservatory in New York - not because of her lack of skill but because of her skin pigmentation. I don't suppose that should have surprised me, but that New York in the 1950s was still that bigoted is pretty shameful. She didn't just take that slight lying down though, and was soon working nightly in a jazz club demonstrating that she was a woman of substance. Soon allied with the pitch perfect guitarist Al Schackman, she begins to drawn bigger crowds, to sing and to find herself a husband/manager in no-nonsense cop Andrew Stroud. Before long, she has a luxury home in Mount Vernon, a Mercedes in the drive and a promising career - but as that success grows, the wheels begin to come off. The relentlessness of her schedule; the arrival of their children; her increasingly veciferous and controversial support of the Civil Rights movement and finally the gradual chasm that developed between her own aspirations and those of her often violent husband all drove her carer into decline and her to thoughts of suicide. Rather than succumb to those, though, she has the presence of mind to get on a plane to Liberia and set about recharging her batteries. Switzerland, Holland and finally Paris all provided conduits for her reinvention of herself before she finally accepts that she would need medication to control her clinically defined illnesses and settles in the South of France. There is a phenomenal collection of archive included here and that, coupled with some frank contributions from her daughter Lisa, a taped interview from 2008 with her ex-husband and contributions from Schackman and others close to her and her family during the time of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination, all puts quite a lot of meat on the bones of a character who was in many ways strong and determined, but in others vulnerable. There are no shortage of clips from her musical performances - including a powerfully subtle one from Montreaux in 1976 and by the conclusion I couldn't help compare her life with the equally turbulent ones of the likes of Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner as they, too, struggled with demons from within and without. It was Maya Angelou who posed the title question, and Liz Garbus and some very proficient archivists make a solid effort to let us know.

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