“It’s a very moving violent song, because that’s how I feel about the whole thing.”
Nina Simone has been with me. For at least 20 years now. If she’s been with you, you know what I mean. Her songs have made you feel all of the things one can possibly feel. Her “Trouble in Mind” and this live rendition of it might be the saddest song ever. The drummer is so on point with the ride cymbal, and her piano is, as always, classical. I like to pretend that that “Oh boy” towards the end isn’t just a signal to the band to wrap up the song; she actually MADE herself sad enough to utter it in that way... her tone going lower and lower on “’Cause the sun’s gonna shine in my back door someday” until it’s just: “Oh boy."
My explanation of my love for her flails in the face of you just listening to this, this, and this, but I’d say it started on the basest level: with me just loving to sing along with her by myself a long time ago. Singing along with her own songs, jazz standards, protest songs, spirituals, her own songs, Bob Dylan and Bee Gees covers. No one really knows it but me, but she and I sing very well together. And loving a singer in that way means loving him or her in a way very few people (except maybe those who ride in your car with you) know about. My love for her is not just about her piano playing, her voice, her anger, and her dedication. It’s about how I sound when I sing with her. It’s a very selfish sort of identification (maybe identity is all selfish). I am not any of the singers I love singing along with (Tom Petty included), but it is a very personal thing. I am not Nina Simone, I did not live through what she lived through, but I feel this way too (sad about love, angry about injustice, in love with music). And she clearly feels this way. Let us sing together.
So as a less than casual fan, my obsessive reading about her began before one could just do that on one’s phone. And my excitement when I finally watched the documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? earlier this summer knew no bounds. The movie made me revisit “Mississippi Goddam”, a song I knew and loved and thought I had already felt all the appropriate feelings (disgust and dismay) about... but real disgust and dismay got realer having watched the movie this summer, post-Charleston and post-Sandra-Bland. And watching Nina Simone talk about her own disgust and dismay over so many things that had built up and are still building up (“When the kids got killed in that church, that did it. First, you get depressed, and after that you get mad,” she says), felt so sad and prescient. And then there is the sometimes unfortunate fact that a piece of art can be revisited and the same conclusion can be drawn ad infinitum. See Hamlet. See The Diary of Anne Frank. See The Things They Carried. See Citizen. See man’s inhumanity towards man. Forever.
But then then also, how thankful I am for the actual art itself, outside of the circumstances of its creation. How much art can echo. And how the act of echoing can be a tiny comfort in the face of huge hurt.
If you’re a fan like me, you’ve probably already watched it. If you’re new to her, your mouth will hang open in amazement the whole time she’s on screen. She is imperfect perfection. She swears excellently (“I was a goddamned good mother”). Her eyes are wild and bright. She is clearly troubled by the extremeness of her emotions. And her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly speaks lovingly and frankly throughout, which must have been incredibly difficult (“If you ask me, they were both nuts,” she says of her parents, a line that might be uttered about all parents everywhere).
But the framing of that song within the documentary is what got me in my own disgust and dismay this summer. After it had already gotten me 20 years ago. My favorite part of the song has always been the little small plainspoken part of the chorus: “Tennessee made me lose my rest.” She’s calling out the news stories that people would have known about Tennessee in the early 1960s, obviously, but just the quiet notion of some thing making one lose one’s rest, and her precisely southern phrasing of it: made me lose my rest.
A feeling that sounds so tame compared to the historical circumstances that created it. A sad sad echo
Comments