On stage, her presence was magic. . . . She had such charisma. She almost didn’t have to sing. The way she held herself, her energy, her majesty. She was a queen up there. Everyone felt it. Performing on stage, she forgot everything else. What a voice! I’d say at least three-quarters of her concerts were absolute triumphs.
— Raymond Gonzalez (quoted in Zwerin) I love them to love me and if they’re going to have an idol, they should have a good one, and that’s me.
— Nina Simone (quoted in Griffiths)
1958 –1962
Fourteen hours after Simone went into the studio, she completed the album called Jazz as Played in an Exclusive Side Street, also known as Little Girl Blue, recorded with Jimmy Bond on bass and Al Heath on drums. Her friend and associate Al Schackman was touring with Burt Bacharach at the
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Nina triumphant. Simone had no desire to pursue a career as a popular singer, for her heart was still in her classical studies. But in the years following her recording debut, Jazz as Played in an Exclusive Side Street (Little Girl Blue), Simone became known for her Midtown style.
Millions of her records sold, both legally and illegally recorded. Although she ran into a few obstacles with the seedier side of the recording industry, Simone came out on top. This photograph was taken at a concert in Paris in 1991.
time, so, much to Simone’s regret, he was unable to make it to the session.
The songs captured that day were representative of a typical night at the Midtown, though the record was devoid of Simone’s instrumental improvisations that live audiences received. Of course, Simone’s signature version of “I Loves You Porgy” was included. The first track on the album was the classic “Mood Indigo,” followed by “Don’t Smoke in Bed.” “He Needs Me,” a song Simone picked up after hearing Peggy Lee’s rendition, came next, followed by the title track, “Little Girl Blue.” “Plain Gold Ring” followed, a piece Simone had learned from harpist Kitty White. Also contained on the album were an instrumental version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (from the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel), another instrumental titled “Good Bait,” and the Simone classics
“Love Me or Leave Me” and “My Baby Just Cares for Me.”
(Simone claims that this last piece was included at the session because Nathan wanted an “up-tempo number” to finish the day.) When two of the scheduled songs were scrapped, Simone — though she had never written a song before — composed replacement songs on the spot: “Central Park Blues” (they had just been in the famed Manhattan park shooting publicity photos for the album) and “African Mailman.” The latter ultimately didn’t make it onto Side Street; but Bethlehem used it on a later album, along with two other tunes taped at this session (“For All We Know” and the traditional spiritual
“He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”).
At the end of the recording session, Simone was handed a piece of paper, which she unthinkingly signed. Unknowingly, she had, with a turn of her hand, relinquished all of her rights to the album. It was a mistake, she wrote in her autobiography, that would ultimately cost her over a million dollars. It was only the first in a long series of problematic dealings with the recording industry that Simone would experience over the course of her career.
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Jazz as Played in an Exclusive Side Street/Little Girl Blue was released in mid-1958, marking Simone’s debut as an official artist. But, as she later wrote in her autobiography, “The first album I ever made was a pirate that I never got paid for.”
(I Put a Spell on You, 57) During one of her gigs in Philadelphia, someone had illegally recorded her performance. The bootleg eventually appeared as an album called Starring Nina Simone.
It contained such classic Simone gems as “I Loves You Porgy,”
“Baubles, Bangles, and Beads,” “Since My Lover Has Gone,”
and the Norwegian traditional “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” all performed in her distinctive vocal style. In 1965, she took the label to court to prevent the company from making any more money from the pirated album.
A STAR IS BORN
Nothing significant occurred with Little Girl Blue until a Philadelphia radio deejay named Sid Marx started playing
“I Loves You Porgy” three or four times in a row. The station was soon bombarded with requests for the song, and “Porgy”
became a hit in the city. Within a few weeks, radio listeners in New York fell for Simone’s plaintive, yet understated, rendition of the Gershwin tune, and it played again and again across the airwaves up and down the East Coast. Soon it caught on across the country, and by the summer of 1959, it had climbed up the national pop charts into the top twenty.
It also landed the number two spot on the R&B charts.
“I Loves You Porgy” went on to sell a million copies. It was Simone’s first major success, firmly establishing her reputation in the American cultural firmament. (Unbelievably, though, it was the only one of Simone’s songs ever to make it to the U.S. top-twenty charts.)
In those first months after the album was released, while Simone’s star was beginning to rise, she decided to marry Don Ross. It was to be a very short-lived marriage, dissolving in 1959 when she walked out on him. Simone
wrote, “I realized marrying Don was a mistake before that first month ended. . . . I had originally married Don so I’d never be alone, but after we had got married I went home hoping he wouldn’t be there.” (I Put a Spell on You, 63) By then, she was living in New York, having been convinced by her agent Jerry Fields that she needed to be there instead of in Philadelphia if she wanted to succeed. Although she was tremendously busy performing, she still had difficulty making ends meet. She continued to send money home to her mother, and she paid for rent and food for Ross and herself. Because she needed still more to help pay the bills, she also worked as a maid for a white family. After all, her heart was still in classical music, and she was still intent on furthering her classical studies.
The unexpected success of “I Loves You Porgy” led to yet more bookings for Simone, and those bookings gradually became bigger and bigger. On September 12, 1959, Simone debuted at the famed Town Hall in New York City, where the groundbreaking African-American singer Marian Anderson had launched her operatic career in 1935. It was at this concert that Simone really became a known singer. She appeared with Horace Silver and J.J. Johnson, two well-established and widely respected musicians. In a review of the show for The New York Times, critic John S. Wilson wrote that Simone “easily held her own” in the company of Silver and Johnson. She was a commanding performer, and she captivated both audience and critics. Wilson called Simone “a gifted interpreter, a singer who makes each song her own.” “By the time she has finished turning a song this way and that way,” he wrote, “poking experimentally into unexpected crannies she finds in it, or suddenly leaping on it and whaling the daylights out of it, the song has lost most of its original colorization and has become, one might say, ‘Simonized.’ ” (Wilson 1959)
Simone’s stage presence was so compelling that she
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developed an almost cult-like following among her fans, which continues to this day. She became known for her powerful live performances, and it was, in fact, the live recording of that Town Hall show that truly propelled her to stardom.