Nina Simone may have died in 2003 at the age of 70, but it's hard to get away from her and her music now. In the aftermath of Freddie Gray's death in the custody of the Baltimore police, versions of her cover of Randy Newman's heartbreaking "Baltimore" popped up all over YouTube and Facebook.
There's a forthcoming bio-pic starring Zoe Saldana. In last year's documentary about Australian singer Nick Cave, 20,000 Days on Earth, Cave and his sideman, Warren Ellis, spend several minutes vividly recalling how each of them had spent time with her backstage.
Kanye West and Jay Z have regularly incorporated her sound bites into their work, and Lauryn Hill is even releasing a new song, "I've Got Life," which samples from Simone's 1968 song "Ain't Got No, I Got Life."
If Simone and her hits like "My Baby Just Cares for Me," "Old Jim Crow," "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" and "I Put a Spell on You" (a cover of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' tune) are just now becoming familiar to you or if you'd like to learn about the woman who sang behind an indelible commercial plugging Chanel perfume, Oscar and Emmy-nominated filmmaker Liz Garbus' new documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? reveals that her personal life was as complicated and eclectic as her music. It's available to stream on Netflix beginning today.
"That's why she was such an exciting artist and why she chafed when people called her a jazz musician, because she was doing something very new and innovative, fusing jazz and classical and folk and R&B and standards and creating music that was innovative and unforgettable," Garbus said by phone from Los Angeles.
"Everything for her existed with opposition. She had dreams of becoming a classical pianist, and those were thwarted. And that was the path that her career took. She never even meant to be a singer. She's a person for whom there are multiple threads and shades of human experience operating. The challenge as a filmmaker is how do you keep a balance with those things at all times? How do you not sanitize this story?"
An Inconvenient Woman
The North Carolina-born Simone (whose real name was Eunice Waymon) was and remains a revered performer, but she's also been a controversial one.
One of her best known compositions is "Mississippi Goddamn," which she wrote in the aftermath of the murder of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which resulted in the death of four girls. The sleeve for the record used "curse word symbols" for the second word of the title, and R&B songs in 1964 usually avoided political themes.
Simone, however, was used to doing what hadn't been done before.
"It was extraordinarily brave for her to release that song. She wrote it in one afternoon. All the emotion just poured out of her," says Garbus.
"For a woman to call out from the stage what she saw as injustice and to say be nice and entertaining, that was a new position for the female performer, and African-American females in particular, and that was very threatening to people. She pushed the boundaries where today's performers can call out injustice when they see it."
Too Close to Home
While Simone's courage is hardly in doubt, her personal life was turbulent. Her 11-year marriage to manager Andy Stroud ended because of his insistence that she stick to her Top 40 offerings and avoid riling her listeners and because he abused her.
At the same time, her daughter, actress Lisa Simone Kelly, who served as an executive producer on and is featured in the film, recalls being beaten by her mother.
"[Simone] was a victim of violence, but she also had problems with depression herself," Garbus says. "I'm so grateful for and admiring of Lisa's trust of me and my team in this film. She was involved from the very beginning of the film. She kind of turned over the keys to the kingdom. She gave us the diaries and letters. She was willing to speak as honestly and with as much vulnerability as possible. The film wouldn't be what it is without her."
Simone relocated to Africa and eventually found a home in Europe, where she finally got a proper diagnosis for her bipolar disorder. To handle the complexity of the musician's life and to avoid making What Happened, Miss Simone? feel like a cold, audiovisual timeline, Garbus collected dozens of audio interviews and assembled them so that Simone narrates her own story.
"We had many sources of audio that we stitched together to form the narration. It was a real challenge to thread together all of those oppositional forces that were in play in Nina's life and in the environment around her. It was a very careful storytelling job, but I loved every minute," says Garbus.
The filmmaker also resisted the urge to feature a parade of fellow music makers recalling her influence on them. Those hoping for a shot of West or Hill gushing about Simone will have to look elsewhere.
Garbus explains, "I really wanted the inside, intimate story of Simone. I didn't want 15 other artists to say how they were influenced by her. That's all out there, and that's the fun Internet search after the movie."
Life in the Cage
Garbus has covered a wide variety of subjects in her previous documentaries. Her Oscar nomination is for her breakthrough film, The Farm: Angola, USA. Her other efforts include the HBO documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World about the troubled chess champion, and Love, Marilyn about screen legend Marilyn Monroe.
"They're all very different, and they're all very connected. They were all in a sort of self-inserted prison, but they also gave so much to all of us," says Garbus. "Prisons that are sort of psychic or physical are the places that I've explored in all of my films."
MovieStyle on 06/26/2015