American singer and pianist Nina Simone blazed across the sky of popular music for what seems like an incredibly brief period. Her meteoric rise to eminence in the early part of the 1960s was matched by her all too sudden disappearance from public life in 1968. The documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, produced by Netflix and now available on Blu-ray from Universal Music and Eagle Rock Entertainment, not only fills in details of Simone’s life before her period in the spotlight but tells us exactly what happened to her.
The movie follows Simone from her earliest beginnings playing piano in church and growing up in segregated America. As a child, she was taken under the wing of two white female piano teachers who recognized her talent. Like any other child learning piano, she had aspirations to become a classical pianist and even attended the Juilliard School of Music.
It was her ambition to become the first female African-American classical pianist. However, when that opportunity was denied her through what she believed was racism, she turned to playing in jazz and blues clubs to help support her family.
It was from those inauspicious beginnings that her career was born. Her fame was assured with the release of her first record and the public’s reception to her rendition of “I Loves You, Porgy” from the Gershwin brothers opera Porgy and Bess. There’s some wonderful footage of her playing the song taken from an old Playboy TV show. The sight of a young black woman playing for an all-white audience of smug wealthy hipsters says more about the state of America in the late 1950s than any political slogans or protests.
For the next five or so years, Simone would do everything from play a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall to sing onstage at Civil Rights rallies. Her famous song, “Mississippi Goddam”, summed up African-American anger at those obstructing their civil rights in the 1960s. As her career took off, she also became friends with the African-American intellectual and artistic communities. James Baldwin, Dick Gregory, and Langston Hughes were among those she counted among her friends, while her neighbours were the family of the late Malcolm X.
However, while on the surface things looked great, her life was far from easy. Using excepts from her diaries to let Simone tell her own story, the movie shows us a life filled with domestic violence (she was beaten by her husband), loneliness, and repressed violent urges. These written passages reveal a deeply troubled mind.
All of a sudden, in 1968, Simone left America and took herself into self-imposed exile – first to Liberia in Africa, then Switzerland, and eventually France. It was while she was in France in the 1980s her mental illness was finally diagnosed – bi-polar. Her violent mood swings, bouts of depression and even her sometimes extreme behaviour were all rooted in this disease.
Director Liz Garbus has done a masterful job of telling Simone’s story. She weaves together archive footage and still photos with contemporary interviews to allow a complete picture of the woman and her times to unfold in front of us. The co-operation of Simone’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, was obviously key in helping her gain access to things like the diaries and other fascinating archival material.
Of course you can’t do a movie about Simone without her music. From start to finish, we are regaled with the splendour and majesty of her performances. While some of the quality isn’t the greatest – we’re talking about footage that dates back almost 60 years in some cases – the black-and-white footage from the old TV shows is wonderful.
Even better is the CD included in this package, as it contains lovely produced versions of many of the songs which feature in the movie. Some highlights include “Mississippi Goddamn”, “Sinnerman”, and her covers of “I Put a Spell on You”, “Black Is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair”, and “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”. The latter is particularly poignant in light of the information we found out about Simone in the movie.
The Blu-ray/CD package of What Happened, Miss Simone? is a wonderful record of an amazing and unique voice in American popular culture. Simone was more than just a wonderful performer, she was also an articulate and passionate voice in the fight for civil rights. As Dick Gregory says in the movie; “She said things with ‘Mississippi Goddamn’ no one else would have dared say”. It is a great movie about an amazing woman that comes with a bonus CD containing some of her greatest songs.