Nina Simone’s life of torment revealed in new documentary

Nina Simone is widely misunderstood but now her daughter has found the right person to tell the story and it’s a must-see for any music fan, whatever their favoured genre, says Claire Black

‘S HE is loved or feared, adored or disliked, but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation. She is an extremist, extremely realized.” That is how Maya Angelou described Nina Simone. And when you watch Liz Garbus’s brilliant documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone? as you absolutely should, those words will ring with truth and accuracy. And then, as you hear Simone’s own words, discovered by Garbus in recordings that no-one knew existed, and those of her daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, as she speaks about a life lived with a mother who was as tortured as she was brilliant, as volatile as she was loving, you will find yourself wondering how we have known so little about a woman whose music we know so well?

Do you remember the first time you ever heard a Nina Simone song? I don’t. I’ve been trying to, but the truth is I think I was too young to recall. There were several of her albums in my dad’s collection of vinyl, most of which were bevelled, some of which were beer-stained, all of which were loved. They were played often and that singular voice (“Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream,” is how Simone herself put it) was both unmistakable and unforgettable. Of course, like most people I probably heard My Baby Just Cares For Me most often after it was used in an advert, but the tracks that lingered were Ne Me Quitte Pas and Strange Fruit and Little Girl Blue with its heady, genre-bending classical piano accompaniment – Simone giving full flight to her musical genius – and, of course, Mississippi Goddam. Think of the lyrics of that song, “Alabama’s got me so upset, Tennessee has made me lose my rest and everybody knows about Mississippi, goddam…” It was the 60s, the height of the civil rights movement and Simone was doing what pretty much no-one else was – singing her protest, talking about the terror and the violence and in that song specifically the murder of four little girls in a church in Mississippi by a white supremacist who lobbed an bomb into the building where they sat. How strange that as I sit writing this, news has just broken about nine people killed in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. They were black. The man arrested in connection with the killings, a 21-year-old white man who had photographs on his Facebook page of him wearing a jacket adorned with the flags of white-rule-era African states. What a horrible, depressing symmetry.

But I’m moving too fast, skipping over a life story that is as complex as it is compelling. Eunice Waymon was born in North Carolina in 1933, the era of segregation. Taken to church by her preacher mother, it was there she first played the piano at the age of three or four. By the time she was seven she was accomplished enough to give a recital and by way of two white women in the congregation who were impressed by what they When Lisa Simone Kelly, second right, wanted to create a film tribute to her mother Nina Simone, far right, she spent ten years looking for the correct director – and she knew straight away that Liz Garbus, right, was the one heard, Waymon began five years of intense piano tuition and the dream of being the first black female classical pianist to play at Carnegie Hall was born. After graduation and a year at Juilliard in New York, she applied to the Curtis Institute of Music to continue her studies. She was rejected. The reason, not stated on the rejection letter, was nothing to do with her talent or her potential, it was the colour of her skin. It was a blow that reverberated throughout her life but before that, it sent her from practice rooms where she was immersed in Bach and Brahms, Liszt and Schumann, to the bars of Atlantic City where she renamed herself Nina Simone (to prevent her mother from realising what she was doing) and sang standards and spirituals and built a reputation as an extraordinary musician, but one who, in some ways, would never quite be understood.

“I feel like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders that I had no idea was there until it was gone,” says Lisa Simone Kelly, Simone’s only daughter, about the process of bringing her mother’s complex life to the screen. “I made my mother a promise on her deathbed that I had her back and I asked when I spoke at various memorials to make sure that she was not forgotten. I made a promise to myself that I wanted my mother to live on in infinity at the same height as the Beatles and Elvis Presley. And I do believe that I’ve accomplished that so I’m feeling very satisfied right now.

“I’m all grown up now. When my mom died [in 2003, at the age of 70] my relationship to who I am and life and my world shifted. I can say that I am a much different person than I was 12 years ago. And it feels really good to be back out into the light because it’s been a tough 12 years.”

It took Simone Kelly and her husband, Rob Kelly, “about ten years” to find the right director and team to make this film. They chose Garbus, who had already made documentaries about prisons in the US, chess master Bobby Fisher and movie star Marilyn Monroe. It was this back catalogue that made Garbus feel that she had been “practising her whole life” to make a film about Simone. “Nina Simone is one of the most complex characters I could tackle,” she says. “The challenge and the joy of the film was exploring those contradictions and I think without including them, all those facets of her personality, there’d be no way to really appreciate and understand her.”

Garbus credits Simone Kelly for being “incredibly brave” in how she allowed the filmmaker access to her life. “She shared the darkest moments of her life, the most intimate recollections. She turned it over to me. There were no parameters – there was no ‘don’t include this’ or ‘if you put this in you have to put that in’. She really just opened herself and trusted and that’s quite an extraordinary. I’m not sure I’d be able to be that brave about my own family life.”

When I ask Simone Kelly about why she felt it was important to be that open and whether she understands it as courageous, there is a pause. “I didn’t really give it that much thought,” she says eventually