The Life Made the Music

It has been said that the innocence and longing in Nina Simone’s first big hit, her recording of George Gershwin’s “I Loves You Porgy,” are somehow diminished by the fact that Simone herself was no starry-eyed romantic.

Simone, who died at 70 on Monday at her home in southern France, had lived an often angry life ever since witnessing, at age 11, a white family order her parents to move to a back row at her own piano recital.

As the singer and pianist later recalled about that day, her “skin grew back again a little more tougher, a little less innocent and a little more black.”

After hearing that four black schoolgirls had been killed in the Ku Klux Klan bombing of an Alabama church in 1963, she wrote the bitter lyrics, “You don’t have to live next to me / Just give me my equality.”

Later, some critics asked how she could be taken seriously when she sang romantically, in Irving Berlin’s “You Can Have Him,” “All I ever wanted to do was / Run my fingers through his curly locks / Mend his underwear and darn his socks.” Simone did sing those words -- and arguably more poignantly than anyone else.

One suspects that the personal imperfections that would lead Simone to experience loss -- specifically, her tendency to place and then lose faith in a series of people and institutions -- deepened, rather than diminished, her ability to evoke a wide range of feeling.

The emotional extremes demonstrated by Simone, are, unfortunately, not often seen in popular music today, which tends to be dominated either by the monotonous rage of rappers or by the assembly-line saccharine of teen pop stars.

Simone often suffered because her life, rather than obeying some rigid ideal of commerce, art or moral perfection, swung messily between emotional opposites. But the music that emerged from her is among America’s most soulful, not in spite of but rather because of the complexity of her life.