Nina Simone’s forthright “Work Song”, written by Nat Adderley and Oscar Brown, Jr., gives voice to the skid from dream-crushing poverty to rock-breaking chain gang. In the newly released 13th, a documentary by Ava DuVernay about racial inequality and criminal justice in the US, “Work Song” serves as incisive accompaniment to the advent of mass incarceration.
Simone’s songs are rarely utilized so fittingly. A new ad for the Apple Watch Series 2 is more typical, set inexplicably to Simone’s black gospel classic “Sinnerman”, a song that’s been used with comparable gall in a crime drama about high art theft and a documentary about sharks.
Another woeful exploitation of Simone can be seen in 2016’s Nina, a factually distorted biopic starring Zoe Saldana in skin-darkening makeup and widened nose. A 33-year-old Saldana playing a 55 to 70-year-old Simone is disorienting to watch, just as Simone’s young gay caretaker made straight and their relationship warped with romantic tensions is offensive. Film critics, Simone’s family, and fans decried the film.
Such appropriations in popular culture, combined with a slighting of Simone in historical accounts of the Civil Rights Movement, make Liz Garbus’s biographical documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015) more than just vital viewing for fans. Her Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning documentary, now available on DVD from Eagle Rock Entertainment, raises the bar for how popular culture and history represent Simone. “This is the film I’ve been practicing to make all these years,” claimed Garbus at its Sundance debut. She’d earned previous acclaim for documentaries focusing on race and criminal justice (The Farm: Angola, USA; The Execution of Wanda Jean; Girlhood), as well as documentaries about public figures (Bobby Fischer Against the World; Love, Marilyn).
Drawing from over 100 hours of recorded interviews, What Happened, Miss Simone? lets Simone narrate her own story: a child prodigy, trained to be the first black classical pianist, becomes a reluctant jazz singer and then an eager Civil Rights Movement revolutionary. Her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly, the documentary’s executive producer, and Al Schackman, Simone’s guitarist for 40 years, provide reliable insights into Simone’s triumphs and heartbreaks. Garbus has been criticized for screentime given to Simone’s abusive husband, but Andy Stroud also served as her manager during peak years and viewers can readily gauge his objectivity for themselves. Furthermore, placed where it is, “Work Song” operates in the documentary as an indictment of Stroud’s treatment of Nina Simone.
Garbus makes thematic use of other songs too. A somber “Porgy” plays when Simone marries Stroud, “I Put a Spell on You” during the accounts of domestic abuse, and “Don’t Smoke in Bed” expedites the divorce. “Little Girl Blue” and a cover of Janis Ian’s “Stars” are offered as troubled self-portraits. “Mississippi Goddam”, Simone’s angry response to intensified violence against Southern blacks, marks a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement and a taking off point for Simone’s activism.
Loyal fans will find What Happened, Miss Simone? as familiar as it is fresh, thanks to personal photos and rare footage. Only montages of Simone’s North Carolina childhood strike me as conspicuous, taking me out of the moment as I try to distinguish between authentic footage, stock footage from the time, and newly shot footage made to look old (Simone’s piano teacher is played by Elisabeth Henry-Macari, according to IMDb). Otherwise authenticity reigns and editing gets the most out of its many juxtapositions. For example: Simone in voice-over complains about being overworked, while a close-up of her diary confesses she “must take sleeping pills to sleep and yellow pills to go onstage”, all framed by the above-mentioned “Work Song” clip that also registers, visually, an evolution away from white standards of glamour and toward Afrocentrism.
The biggest challenge for What Happened, Miss Simone? is to meaningfully disclose her torments and extremes as it documents the torments and extremes of the times themselves. Garbus’s narrative is a bit too tidy here, seeming at one point to answer its titular question by constructing a cause-and-effect relationship between the Civil Rights Movement’s serial tragedies and the debilitation of Simone’s mental health. Attallah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X and goddaughter to Simone, reflects on how “activism during the ’60s rendered chaos… people sacrificed sanity, well-being, life.” This may be true, but even if Simone had avoided activism altogether, it’s likely that she’d still have struggled with what only in her later years was diagnosed as bipolar disorder.
To get a fuller sense of what happened to Miss Simone, to feel a different kind of closeness to her, fans should seek out Jeff L. Lieberman’s documentary, The Amazing Nina Simone (2015), released the same year as What Happened, Miss Simone? and lost in its vast shadow. The Amazing Nina Simone is a lower-budget project, conventional in its cradle-to-grave linearity and spoon-feeding narration, but trust the unhurried, well-detailed, and dare I say academic approach to add up to a satisfyingly complex portrait.
Lieberman interviewed over 50 people from disparate corners of Simone’s life. Her childhood rings much clearer through the memories of her three surviving brothers and fellow students of Simone’s piano teacher. I enjoyed hearing from owners of early venues where Simone developed her style, from her band members and music-scene peers, and from her record producers.
Lieberman also reveals Simone’s bisexuality, confirmed by her lover Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt, daughter of renowned dancer Katherine Dunham, who says, “I loved her and I liked her, this also — importante!” Scholars provide dynamizing insights into Simone’s music and her role in the Civil Rights Movement at a time when a politics of respectability limited women’s activism. Ruth Feldstein, a historian, credits Simone with articulating a nonviolence-rejecting vision of Black Power well before Stokely Carmichael helped to bring that vision into the national debate on race relations.
What Happened, Miss Simone? can be thought of as Nina Simone depicted in stained glass, while The Amazing Miss Simone presents her story in a sparkling mosaic. Serious fans will insist on seeing both.
Kudos to Eagle Rock Entertainment, by the way, for the smart packaging of the What Happened, Miss Simone? DVD. It includes a CD of 15 songs, nine of them from the film. Both discs are available for purchase in a fold-out digipak that owners can store with CDs. As for special features on the DVD itself, we don’t get “bonus interviews” so much as 14-minutes of interview tidbits. Listen for franker comments from Attallah Shabazz (“She’s litmus”) and for humorous airport memories shared by Raymond Gonzalez and Al Schackman (“Her wheelchair was a stroke of genius”).
The Amazing Miss Simone did not achieve Netflix-level visibility like What Happened, Miss Simone. It’s pricier on DVD, from Re-Emerging Films, but it’s also rentable online via Amazon Video.