REMEMBERING OTIS

It's 40 years this week since the tragic untimely death of Otis Redding. Here's how his widow, friends and extended family at Stax Records remembered him:



MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE: WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1967 was a typically balmy winter’s day. The weather was nearly 65 degrees Fahrenheit at midday – too warm for fur coats, but perfect for sunglasses and sharkskin suits, particularly when you put the top down to cruise into work at three in the afternoon, when the sun was at its highest peak. Stax Records, a movie theatre-cum-recording studio a few miles east of the Mississippi, was poppin’ that month: Carla Thomas and Albert King had released Top 100 hits, while The Charmels’ As Long As I’ve Got You and Jeanne And The Darlings’ Soul Girl were making local waves. But in the hallways at 926 East McLemore Avenue the buzz was all about one artist, Otis Redding, who’d returned to the studio for a marathon three-week session following surgery to remove throat polyps. The mood at Stax was stultifying, until Otis stepped up to the mike sometime after lunch and started laying down more than a dozen tracks, including the potentially career-changing tune (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay, a pop-inspired stylistic departure from his previous gut-bucket soul oeuvre.


‘When Otis had the chance to work that long, my kids and I would come into Memphis and stay with him at the Holiday Inn for three or four days at a time,” says Zelma Redding, who met the Macon, Georgia native in 1960 and married him a year later. “Stax was a family – you could feel the warmth, and how these musicians worked together and hung out together,” she says. “The musicians – Wayne [Jackson, trumpeter] and Andrew [Love, saxophonist], and Isaac [Hayes, then a staff songwriter] worked so hard, but they had so much fun working! It wasn’t about money – it was about doing something they loved to do. Then when Otis came in, it was like God had walked in. It was a great feeling.” That reception was a far cry from Otis’s humble beginnings at Stax, just seven years earlier. “Johnny Jenkins And The Pinetoppers pulled up, and Otis was the guy that carried the food and the cloths,” remembers organist Booker T. Jones. “But what I remember most is the end of the session with Otis singing his demo of This arms Of Mine, that moment of him singing that song. It was one of those moments. You’re not thinking that it’s gonna sell a lot of records. You’re just thinking it’s all heart. Nobody hardly paid any attention to him. It was like, ‘Well, we got to do this. The guy’s been sitting here waiting all day, Let’s see what he sounds like.’”


He had on overalls and a plaid shirt, like he was milking a cow,” adds session bassist Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn, “but he took a song and just kicked your ass with it.” “My hair lifted about three inches – I couldn’t believe this guy’s voice,” says Stax guitarist/producer Steve Cropper, who with Jones, Dunn, and drummer Al Jackson, Jr, formed instrumental group Booker T. And The M.G.’s, the nucleus of the Stax sound. “Back then, we were living in a two-room apartment in Macon, and we barely had money to put food on the table,” recalls Zelma. “Otis said, ‘I’m taking Johnny to Memphis,’ and I probably said goodbye. Otis Redding always believed in Otis Redding – he’d tell me, ‘Don’t worry, I’m gonna make you happy one day,’ and I was like, Lord have mercy, we could starve to death! That’s just how positive he was!”


(Sittin On) The Dock of the Bay

In its soft Southern drawl, Jones says it best: “When Otis came into the picture, life became about more than just sound. We became friends, and because he seemed to be a person with a mission, we sort of picked up that mission and it became our mission. His intent was so strong and so powerful when we were recording, it translated to more than just music. I’d never been with anybody that had that much desire to express emotion. It’s the longing. It translates to the listener and the player and anyone who hears it, and when that happens, millions of people listen.” (…) Otis took the label to another level. He put a spark under Stax, there’s no question about it,” he explains. “With all due respect to the great artists that came to those doors, Otis Redding was the one that everybody in that band looked forward to coming back to town. He had the greatest sense of rhythm and timing of anybody I’ve ever worked with. His feel of what he wanted to hear the horns do was unbelievable. He would come up with riffs, and we’d go, boy, they’ll never be able to play that. And they would be awesome. When he’d go sing and they’d play that lick, it was amazing what he’d pull off. He never ran out of ideas. Try A Little Tenderness – that song had been around since the ‘30s or whatever. It became a new song. It was amazing.”


Try a Little Tenderness

Otis’s dates in early December ’67 were nothing out of the ordinary. He and his backing group, Memphis teenagers The Bar-Kays, flew to Nashville for a gig on Friday, December 8. On Saturday they landed in Cleveland, Ohio, to tape an episode of Upbeat, a local TV music show, before playing at Leo’s Casino. Sunday morning, the band – without bassist James Alexander, who took a commercial flight – boarded Redding’s twin-engine Beechcraft, headed to Madison, Wisconsin for another show. “It was his second plane,” says Zelma. “He worked Thursday through Sunday, and he’d come back to Memphis early on Monday to get The Bar-Kays’ saxophonist Phalon Jones, drummer Carl Cunningham, guitarist Jimmy King, and organist Ronnie Caldwell, all just 18 years old, wouldn’t graduate with the rest of their senior class. On their way to Wisconsin, their plane plunged into in icy Lake Monona along with the 26-year old star.


‘I could see something floating in the water, and I got colder and colder trying to swim toward it,” says Bar-Kays trumpeter Ben Cauley, the only one on-board to survive the crash. “My head was bleeding pretty bad, and the current kept pushing all of us apart. I was in the water for about 25 minutes. I got so cold I could hardly hold on. I gave up, and at that moment, one of the fellas onshore grabbed me. I was thinking, Did they get everybody? By the time we got to shore, the hospital people had showed up. They asked, ‘Who are you?’ I said, Otis Redding and The Bar-Kays, out of Memphis. Is everybody all right? And they said no, everybody but me was dead.” Jon Scott, then a Dj at the FM-100 radio station, was, like most Memphians, devastated by the news. “I remember thinking it couldn’t possibly be true,” he says. “I had met Otis. I’d hung round him at the studio. He was, without question, the most captivating artist I’d ever seen, a true genius, and he died way too soon, way too early. We’d lost Buddy Holly the same way, but Otis was just too close to home.” “The crash happened on a Sunday,” says Cauley, “and I was flying home [later] that same week, so shook up about it that if the plane did a curve, I curved with it. I’d just turned 19, and it hit me like a ton of bricks to have to face reality, but James Alexander and I put the band back together again.”


A few months before the 40th anniversary of Otis Redding’s death, an exhibition, I’ve Got Dreams To Remember, chronicling the singer’s ascent to superstardom, opened at the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon, not far from the bronze statue of Otis on the banks of the Ogeechee River. The Bar-Kays, with Ben Cauley on trumpet, joined Otis’s sons Dexter and Otis Redding III on-stage for a fundraiser for the Big O Youth Educational Dream Foundation, while Zelma Redding eulogised her husband as “an everyday country boy – regular people. Otis was just a down-to-earth, loving person. When he came back home, it wasn’t, ‘I’m different – I’m a star.’ He didn’t live that ego. The average person can really feel like they knew Otis Redding when they listen to him sing, because he sang from the heart. Back when he cut These Arms Of Mine, I never thought he would hold the legacy he holds today, but this is what Otis was born to do.”


These Arms of Mine

{Extracts from MOJO Music Magazine, DEC 07 - JAN 08}

It's 40 years this week since the tragic untimely death of Otis Redding. Here's how his widow, friends and extended family at Stax Records remembered him:



MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE: WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1967 was a typically balmy winter’s day. The weather was nearly 65 degrees Fahrenheit at midday – too warm for fur coats, but perfect for sunglasses and sharkskin suits, particularly when you put the top down to cruise into work at three in the afternoon, when the sun was at its highest peak. Stax Records, a movie theatre-cum-recording studio a few miles east of the Mississippi, was poppin’ that month: Carla Thomas and Albert King had released Top 100 hits, while The Charmels’ As Long As I’ve Got You and Jeanne And The Darlings’ Soul Girl were making local waves. But in the hallways at 926 East McLemore Avenue the buzz was all about one artist, Otis Redding, who’d returned to the studio for a marathon three-week session following surgery to remove throat polyps. The mood at Stax was stultifying, until Otis stepped up to the mike sometime after lunch and started laying down more than a dozen tracks, including the potentially career-changing tune (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay, a pop-inspired stylistic departure from his previous gut-bucket soul oeuvre.


‘When Otis had the chance to work that long, my kids and I would come into Memphis and stay with him at the Holiday Inn for three or four days at a time,” says Zelma Redding, who met the Macon, Georgia native in 1960 and married him a year later. “Stax was a family – you could feel the warmth, and how these musicians worked together and hung out together,” she says. “The musicians – Wayne [Jackson, trumpeter] and Andrew [Love, saxophonist], and Isaac [Hayes, then a staff songwriter] worked so hard, but they had so much fun working! It wasn’t about money – it was about doing something they loved to do. Then when Otis came in, it was like God had walked in. It was a great feeling.” That reception was a far cry from Otis’s humble beginnings at Stax, just seven years earlier. “Johnny Jenkins And The Pinetoppers pulled up, and Otis was the guy that carried the food and the cloths,” remembers organist Booker T. Jones. “But what I remember most is the end of the session with Otis singing his demo of This arms Of Mine, that moment of him singing that song. It was one of those moments. You’re not thinking that it’s gonna sell a lot of records. You’re just thinking it’s all heart. Nobody hardly paid any attention to him. It was like, ‘Well, we got to do this. The guy’s been sitting here waiting all day, Let’s see what he sounds like.’”


He had on overalls and a plaid shirt, like he was milking a cow,” adds session bassist Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn, “but he took a song and just kicked your ass with it.” “My hair lifted about three inches – I couldn’t believe this guy’s voice,” says Stax guitarist/producer Steve Cropper, who with Jones, Dunn, and drummer Al Jackson, Jr, formed instrumental group Booker T. And The M.G.’s, the nucleus of the Stax sound. “Back then, we were living in a two-room apartment in Macon, and we barely had money to put food on the table,” recalls Zelma. “Otis said, ‘I’m taking Johnny to Memphis,’ and I probably said goodbye. Otis Redding always believed in Otis Redding – he’d tell me, ‘Don’t worry, I’m gonna make you happy one day,’ and I was like, Lord have mercy, we could starve to death! That’s just how positive he was!”


(Sittin On) The Dock of the Bay

In its soft Southern drawl, Jones says it best: “When Otis came into the picture, life became about more than just sound. We became friends, and because he seemed to be a person with a mission, we sort of picked up that mission and it became our mission. His intent was so strong and so powerful when we were recording, it translated to more than just music. I’d never been with anybody that had that much desire to express emotion. It’s the longing. It translates to the listener and the player and anyone who hears it, and when that happens, millions of people listen.” (…) Otis took the label to another level. He put a spark under Stax, there’s no question about it,” he explains. “With all due respect to the great artists that came to those doors, Otis Redding was the one that everybody in that band looked forward to coming back to town. He had the greatest sense of rhythm and timing of anybody I’ve ever worked with. His feel of what he wanted to hear the horns do was unbelievable. He would come up with riffs, and we’d go, boy, they’ll never be able to play that. And they would be awesome. When he’d go sing and they’d play that lick, it was amazing what he’d pull off. He never ran out of ideas. Try A Little Tenderness – that song had been around since the ‘30s or whatever. It became a new song. It was amazing.”


Try a Little Tenderness

Otis’s dates in early December ’67 were nothing out of the ordinary. He and his backing group, Memphis teenagers The Bar-Kays, flew to Nashville for a gig on Friday, December 8. On Saturday they landed in Cleveland, Ohio, to tape an episode of Upbeat, a local TV music show, before playing at Leo’s Casino. Sunday morning, the band – without bassist James Alexander, who took a commercial flight – boarded Redding’s twin-engine Beechcraft, headed to Madison, Wisconsin for another show. “It was his second plane,” says Zelma. “He worked Thursday through Sunday, and he’d come back to Memphis early on Monday to get The Bar-Kays’ saxophonist Phalon Jones, drummer Carl Cunningham, guitarist Jimmy King, and organist Ronnie Caldwell, all just 18 years old, wouldn’t graduate with the rest of their senior class. On their way to Wisconsin, their plane plunged into in icy Lake Monona along with the 26-year old star.


‘I could see something floating in the water, and I got colder and colder trying to swim toward it,” says Bar-Kays trumpeter Ben Cauley, the only one on-board to survive the crash. “My head was bleeding pretty bad, and the current kept pushing all of us apart. I was in the water for about 25 minutes. I got so cold I could hardly hold on. I gave up, and at that moment, one of the fellas onshore grabbed me. I was thinking, Did they get everybody? By the time we got to shore, the hospital people had showed up. They asked, ‘Who are you?’ I said, Otis Redding and The Bar-Kays, out of Memphis. Is everybody all right? And they said no, everybody but me was dead.” Jon Scott, then a Dj at the FM-100 radio station, was, like most Memphians, devastated by the news. “I remember thinking it couldn’t possibly be true,” he says. “I had met Otis. I’d hung round him at the studio. He was, without question, the most captivating artist I’d ever seen, a true genius, and he died way too soon, way too early. We’d lost Buddy Holly the same way, but Otis was just too close to home.” “The crash happened on a Sunday,” says Cauley, “and I was flying home [later] that same week, so shook up about it that if the plane did a curve, I curved with it. I’d just turned 19, and it hit me like a ton of bricks to have to face reality, but James Alexander and I put the band back together again.”


A few months before the 40th anniversary of Otis Redding’s death, an exhibition, I’ve Got Dreams To Remember, chronicling the singer’s ascent to superstardom, opened at the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon, not far from the bronze statue of Otis on the banks of the Ogeechee River. The Bar-Kays, with Ben Cauley on trumpet, joined Otis’s sons Dexter and Otis Redding III on-stage for a fundraiser for the Big O Youth Educational Dream Foundation, while Zelma Redding eulogised her husband as “an everyday country boy – regular people. Otis was just a down-to-earth, loving person. When he came back home, it wasn’t, ‘I’m different – I’m a star.’ He didn’t live that ego. The average person can really feel like they knew Otis Redding when they listen to him sing, because he sang from the heart. Back when he cut These Arms Of Mine, I never thought he would hold the legacy he holds today, but this is what Otis was born to do.”


These Arms of Mine

{Extracts from MOJO Music Magazine, DEC 07 - JAN 08}

HERSTORY: TRIBUTO A NINA SIMONE

Nina Simone (February 21, 1933 - April 21, 2003) -- "Priestess of Soul"-- Composed over 500 songs, recorded almost 60 albums. First woman to win the Jazz Cultural Award "Woman of the Year" 1966, Jazz at Home ClubFemale Jazz Singer of the Year, 1967, National Association of Television and Radio Announcers.
In 1993, Don Shewey wrote of Nina Simone in the Village Voice, "She's not a pop singer, she's a diva, a hopeless eccentric ... who has so thoroughly co-mingled her odd talent and brooding temperament that she has turned herself into a force of nature, an exotic creature spied so infrequently that every appearance is legendary."

Nina Simone was born as Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, daughter of John D. Waylon and Mary Kate Waymon, an ordained Methodist minister. The house was filled with music, Nina Simone later recalled, and she learned to play piano early. When her mother took a job as a maid for extra money, the family saw that young Eunice had special musical talent and sponsored classical piano lessons for her. She studied with a Mrs. Miller and then with Muriel Massinovitch.
For her last year of high school, Nina Simone attended Juilliard School of Music, as part of her plan to prepare to attend the Curtis Institute of Music. She took the entrance exam for the Curtis Institute's classical piano program, but was not accepted. Nina Simone believed that she was good enough for the program, but that she was rejected because she was black. Her family by that time had moved to Philadelphia, and she began to give piano lessons. When she discovered that one of her students was playing in a bar in Atlantic City -- and being paid more than she was from her piano teaching -- she decided to try this route herself. Armed with music from many genres -- classical, jazz, popular -- she began playing piano in 1954 at the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City.
She adopted the name of Nina Simone to avoid her mother's religious disapproval of playing in a bar. The bar owner demanded soon that she add vocals to her piano playing, and Nina Simone began to draw large audiences of younger people who were fascinated by her eclectic musical repertoire and style. Soon she was playing in better nightclubs, and moved into the Greenwich Village scene.

Black is The Color of My True Love's Hair

By 1957, Nina Simone had found an agent, and the next year issued her first album, "Little Girl Blue." Her first single, "I Loves You Porgy," was a George Gershwin song from Porgy and Bess that had been a popular number for Billie Holiday. It sold well, and her recording career was launched. Unfortunately, the contract she signed gave away her rights, a mistake she came to bitterly regret. For her next album she signed with Colpix and released "The Amazing Nina Simone." With this album came more critical interest. Nina Simone briefly married Don Ross in 1958, and divorced him the next year. She married Andy Stroud in 1960 -- a former police detective who became her recording agent -- and they had a daughter, Lisa Celeste, in 1961. This daughter, separated from her mother for long periods in her childhood, eventually launched her own career with the stage name of, simply, Simone. Nina Simone and Andy Stroud drifted apart with her career and political interests, and their marriage ended in divorce in 1970.
In the 1960s, Nina Simone was part of the civil rights movement and later the black power movement. Her songs are considered by some as anthems of those movements, and their evolution shows the growing hopelessness that American racial problems would be solved. Nina Simone wrote "Mississippi Goddam" after the bombing of a Baptist church in Alabama killed four children and after Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississipppi. This song, often sung in civil rights contexts, was not often played on radio. She introduced this song in performances as a show tune for a show that hadn't yet been written. Other Nina Simone songs adopted by the civil rights movement as anthems included "Backlash Blues,” "Old Jim Crow," "Four Women," and "To Be Young, Gifted and Black." The latter was composed in honor of her friend Lorraine Hansberry and became an anthem for the growing black power movement with its line, "Say it clear, say it loud, I am black and I am proud!"

To Be Young, Gifted And Black

With the growing women's movement, "Four Women" and her cover of Sinatra's "My Way" became feminist anthems as well. But just a few years later, Nina Simone's friends Lorraine Hansberry and Langston Hughes were dead. Black heroes Martin Luther King, jr., and Malcolm X, were assassinated. In the late 1970s, a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service found Nina Simone accused of tax evasion; she lost her home to the IRS. Nina Simone's growing bitterness over America's racism, her disputes with the record companies she called "pirates," her troubles with the IRS all led to her decision to leave the United States. She first moved to Barbados, and then, with the encouragement of Miriam Makeba and others, moved to Liberia. A later move to Switzerland for the sake of her daughter's education was followed by a comeback attempt in London which failed when she put her faith in a sponsor who turned out to be a con man who robbed and beat her and abandoned her. She tried to commit suicide, but when that failed, found her faith in the future renewed. She built her career slowly, moving to Paris in 1978, having small successes. In 1985, Nina Simone returned to the United States to record and perform, choosing to pursue fame in her native land. She focused on what would be popular, de-emphasizing her political views, and won growing acclaim. Her career soared when a British commercial used her 1958 recording of "My Baby Just Cares for Me," which then became a hit in Europe. Nina Simone moved back to Europe -- first to the Netherlands then to the South of France in 1991. She published her biography, I Put a Spell on You, and continued to record and perform. In 1995, she won ownership of 52 of her master recordings in a San Francisco court, and in 94-95 she had what she described as "a very intense love affair" -- "it was like a volcano." In her last years, Nina Simone was sometimes seen in a wheelchair between performances. She died April 21, 2003, in her adopted homeland, France.

Four Woman

In a 1969 interview with Phyl Garland, Nina Simone said: “There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be.” Nina Simone is often classified as a jazz singer, but this is what she had to say in 1997 (in an interview with Brantley Bardin): To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt and that's not what I play. I play black classical music. That's why I don't like the term "jazz," and Duke Ellington didn't like it either -- it's a term that's simply used to identify black people."

Source: Women’s History (Text)

Nina Simone (February 21, 1933 - April 21, 2003) -- "Priestess of Soul"-- Composed over 500 songs, recorded almost 60 albums. First woman to win the Jazz Cultural Award "Woman of the Year" 1966, Jazz at Home ClubFemale Jazz Singer of the Year, 1967, National Association of Television and Radio Announcers.
In 1993, Don Shewey wrote of Nina Simone in the Village Voice, "She's not a pop singer, she's a diva, a hopeless eccentric ... who has so thoroughly co-mingled her odd talent and brooding temperament that she has turned herself into a force of nature, an exotic creature spied so infrequently that every appearance is legendary."

Nina Simone was born as Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, daughter of John D. Waylon and Mary Kate Waymon, an ordained Methodist minister. The house was filled with music, Nina Simone later recalled, and she learned to play piano early. When her mother took a job as a maid for extra money, the family saw that young Eunice had special musical talent and sponsored classical piano lessons for her. She studied with a Mrs. Miller and then with Muriel Massinovitch.
For her last year of high school, Nina Simone attended Juilliard School of Music, as part of her plan to prepare to attend the Curtis Institute of Music. She took the entrance exam for the Curtis Institute's classical piano program, but was not accepted. Nina Simone believed that she was good enough for the program, but that she was rejected because she was black. Her family by that time had moved to Philadelphia, and she began to give piano lessons. When she discovered that one of her students was playing in a bar in Atlantic City -- and being paid more than she was from her piano teaching -- she decided to try this route herself. Armed with music from many genres -- classical, jazz, popular -- she began playing piano in 1954 at the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City.
She adopted the name of Nina Simone to avoid her mother's religious disapproval of playing in a bar. The bar owner demanded soon that she add vocals to her piano playing, and Nina Simone began to draw large audiences of younger people who were fascinated by her eclectic musical repertoire and style. Soon she was playing in better nightclubs, and moved into the Greenwich Village scene.

Black is The Color of My True Love's Hair

By 1957, Nina Simone had found an agent, and the next year issued her first album, "Little Girl Blue." Her first single, "I Loves You Porgy," was a George Gershwin song from Porgy and Bess that had been a popular number for Billie Holiday. It sold well, and her recording career was launched. Unfortunately, the contract she signed gave away her rights, a mistake she came to bitterly regret. For her next album she signed with Colpix and released "The Amazing Nina Simone." With this album came more critical interest. Nina Simone briefly married Don Ross in 1958, and divorced him the next year. She married Andy Stroud in 1960 -- a former police detective who became her recording agent -- and they had a daughter, Lisa Celeste, in 1961. This daughter, separated from her mother for long periods in her childhood, eventually launched her own career with the stage name of, simply, Simone. Nina Simone and Andy Stroud drifted apart with her career and political interests, and their marriage ended in divorce in 1970.
In the 1960s, Nina Simone was part of the civil rights movement and later the black power movement. Her songs are considered by some as anthems of those movements, and their evolution shows the growing hopelessness that American racial problems would be solved. Nina Simone wrote "Mississippi Goddam" after the bombing of a Baptist church in Alabama killed four children and after Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississipppi. This song, often sung in civil rights contexts, was not often played on radio. She introduced this song in performances as a show tune for a show that hadn't yet been written. Other Nina Simone songs adopted by the civil rights movement as anthems included "Backlash Blues,” "Old Jim Crow," "Four Women," and "To Be Young, Gifted and Black." The latter was composed in honor of her friend Lorraine Hansberry and became an anthem for the growing black power movement with its line, "Say it clear, say it loud, I am black and I am proud!"

To Be Young, Gifted And Black

With the growing women's movement, "Four Women" and her cover of Sinatra's "My Way" became feminist anthems as well. But just a few years later, Nina Simone's friends Lorraine Hansberry and Langston Hughes were dead. Black heroes Martin Luther King, jr., and Malcolm X, were assassinated. In the late 1970s, a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service found Nina Simone accused of tax evasion; she lost her home to the IRS. Nina Simone's growing bitterness over America's racism, her disputes with the record companies she called "pirates," her troubles with the IRS all led to her decision to leave the United States. She first moved to Barbados, and then, with the encouragement of Miriam Makeba and others, moved to Liberia. A later move to Switzerland for the sake of her daughter's education was followed by a comeback attempt in London which failed when she put her faith in a sponsor who turned out to be a con man who robbed and beat her and abandoned her. She tried to commit suicide, but when that failed, found her faith in the future renewed. She built her career slowly, moving to Paris in 1978, having small successes. In 1985, Nina Simone returned to the United States to record and perform, choosing to pursue fame in her native land. She focused on what would be popular, de-emphasizing her political views, and won growing acclaim. Her career soared when a British commercial used her 1958 recording of "My Baby Just Cares for Me," which then became a hit in Europe. Nina Simone moved back to Europe -- first to the Netherlands then to the South of France in 1991. She published her biography, I Put a Spell on You, and continued to record and perform. In 1995, she won ownership of 52 of her master recordings in a San Francisco court, and in 94-95 she had what she described as "a very intense love affair" -- "it was like a volcano." In her last years, Nina Simone was sometimes seen in a wheelchair between performances. She died April 21, 2003, in her adopted homeland, France.

Four Woman

In a 1969 interview with Phyl Garland, Nina Simone said: “There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be.” Nina Simone is often classified as a jazz singer, but this is what she had to say in 1997 (in an interview with Brantley Bardin): To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt and that's not what I play. I play black classical music. That's why I don't like the term "jazz," and Duke Ellington didn't like it either -- it's a term that's simply used to identify black people."

Source: Women’s History (Text)