Nina Simone was born into a poor family in 1933. Her real name was Eunice Kathleen Waymon. Her music talent was already evident in her childhood. However, Nina’s life was a testimony to the fact that the music industry and the music market left no room for black people to practice their art except in bars and nightclubs. On the other hand, the political situation forced artists to become politically active, using their art to support Black movements and struggles. This also influenced their music in terms of style and content.
In the 1960s, the civil rights movement grew and spread across the United States. Nina Simone became part of this movement with her voice and her music and took an active part in it. In June 1963, one of the leaders of the movement, Medgar Evers, was murdered. A few months later, a bomb exploded in a Baptist church in Alabama, killing four black girls and leaving the fifth blind. Nina wrote her first protest song, Mississippi Goddam, about these events. The song was banned, and Nina Simone was targeted by the authorities. The American music industry also placed many obstacles in the way of releasing her albums, preventing her songs from being broadcast on the radio and not allowing her influence to grow during her lifetime.
Nina Simone’s life and political experiences heightened her awareness of the tragedy of black people, especially the tragedy of black women. In 1963, Nina Simone sang a song called Blackbird [1]. The only musical instrument in this song was a bongo, a kind of African drum. Bongos and Nina Simone’s voices originated in Africa, where they were forcibly uprooted and brought to America as slaves. They were witnesses to the sadness and suffering of this migration, statelessness and slavery.
Nina Simone learned that after many tragic experiences of black people, the way was blocked. For black women in particular, there was no way out of white heaven except murder and plunder. Women, more than anyone else, were victims of the centuries-old system of slavery. Therefore, Nina focused more on the tragedy of black women in her songs. In the songs Four Women and Blackbird, this tragedy was addressed directly. In the song Four Women, whose lyrics and music were written by her, she links cruelty and exploitation to slavery.
She links cruelty and plunder to four stereotypes produced about black women. In this song, the colonial and patriarchal system is well depicted as they help each other to exploit women’s labor and dishonor them. Black women were subjected to class, gender, and ethnic discrimination and exploitation. In Simone’s voice, the blackbird was weeping and crying over the fate and suffering of black women. The blackbird as an anthem of black women [2] became a symbol of their pain and suffering, and more than that, it became a symbol of the brutality of the colonial system that ruled over them for hundreds of years.
Nina Simone, the blackbird whose flight was impeded, folded her wings in her dream in 2003 and flew freely into the sky of death. After the funeral ceremony, her ashes were scattered over several African countries. Like a cloud of ashes, she returned to the countries from which she had been abducted as a slave. Simone is an African story of Phenix. At the end of her flight, she turned to ash and rained down from the sky onto her land. From her ashes and those of pigeons like her, thousands of pigeons gather, rise and try to fly into the dark sky.
Blackbird
Why you wanna fly Blackbird, you ain’t ever gonna fly
No place big enough for holding all the tears you’re gonna cry
Cause your mama’s name was lonely, and your daddy’s name was pain
And he called you little sorrow, cause you’ll never love again
Why you wanna fly Blackbird, you ain’t ever gonna fly
You ain’t go no one to hold you, you ain’t got no one to care
If you’d only understand dear, nobody wants you anywhere
So why you wanna fly Blackbird, you ain’t ever gonna fly
Bibliography
[1] Black Bird, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=139fXzrRjyc
[2] Nina Simone’s Blackbird: “An Anthem for the Struggle&Pain of a Black Woman” https://blackthen.com/nina-simones-blackbird-the-struggle-pain-of-a-black-woman/
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