1970: Nina Simone, Black Gold
By Sharon Udoh
The 1970 album Black Gold begins with an introduction: “My name is Ed Williams, and I’ve been asked to introduce Miss Simone to you this evening. That for me is a pleasure. I’d like to welcome you”.
Nina Simone had released at least 20 records before she released this one. It was one of quite a few live albums she had delivered alongside studio recordings from various labels. At this point in her career, she had received critical acclaim in blues and jazz circles, giving her own unique flair with classical tinges to pop songs of the time.
She was dubbed the “the High Priestess of Soul” and had garnered much respect; at a 1969 performance at Amherst College, upon beginning to play Nina discovered that her seat was too low. A white man appeared, and nearly kneeling to adjust the seat, caressed the air gently around her upon reaching the desired height. As he glided offstage, Nina glanced at the audience, garnering applause. She returned to the E minor chord and her guitarist, Emile Latimer, smiled affirmingly.
On October 26, 1969, the day that Black Gold was recorded, Nina Simone sat a grand at the Philharmonic Hall in New York with almost 2800 people. “They tell me it’s a full house,” she later told the crowd. After introducing the band, Mr. Williams recited a few words over driving percussion. Among them was a poem called “Justice” written by Langston Hughes.
The album’s opening song, “Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair,” is a folk tune of Scottish origin that was a staple in Nina’s repertoire. The selections on this album, like most of Nina’s, showcased her musical range and her deftness; she could make any song feel like she was the author. Nina only co-wrote one song on this album, the last one, co-written by her organist, Weldon Irvine. Nina never played the folk tune—or any song for that matter—exactly the same way. She often changed keys, took pauses in different places, and drew out various words with her heavy yet delicate phrasing. And right after this specific version, her guitarist, one of the only people she let sing with her, delivers the song again with different lyrics, accentuated from time to time with a trill or a triad from Nina. The song is addressed from Nina to a male, and from Mr. Latimer to a female, as a love song, a song of loss and longing.
Nina perhaps felt the need to be constant in her reinvention. She identified heavily with the Civil Rights movement, she watched it crumble around her, leaving her a lone survivor amongst a sea of vanished comrades. This seems to be at the forefront of this record; Langston Hughes, whose words started off the evening, had passed in 1967. Of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated less than a year later. Lorraine Hansberry, another close friend, who inspired the hit from this album, died at the devastatingly young age of 34 in 1965. Her friend Miriam Makeba, who wrote “West Wind”, was exiled to Guinea in 1969. Her contribution to the movement made her feel the most alive she had ever felt. Afterwards, she felt “the days when revolution really had seemed possible were gone forever,” leaving her “like a seduced schoolgirl, lost.”
She echoes this sentiment in the peppy “Ain't Got No / I Got Life”, a medley rewritten by Nina combining two songs from the musical Hair: “Ain't got no money, ain't got no friends, no schooling, no work, no job, no money, no mind.” She broods over the next lines: “Ain’t got no father, no mother, no sisters or no brothers…nobody but myself…no country, and no God.” After the triumphant “I Got Life” portion was sung followed by an upbeat groove, the band slowed down and she shared where she honestly was: “Said I got my soul though it’s been strained a little lately,” inciting applause from the audience, and then, “the voice has been abused too much lately,” followed by almost no response except for a lonely guitar melody. “But I still got my choice of live, die, laughing crying / And though I do them all, I gotta stay till my job is done,” each phrase punctuated in determination with strike of a chord. And she continues, resolving her musical phrase, “And until then… And until then!” Nina paused with her infamous vocal passages, somewhere between scat and melisma. It’s almost as if Nina had to encourage herself to finish the song, …I got life!”
--
On May 25, 2020, the world watched a Black man lose his life in front of us all, suffocating for 9 minutes and 29 seconds under the knee of a police officer and calling out for the help of a Black woman, his mother. George Floyd’s death came on the heels of the death of another Black woman who, right before she was killed, was sleeping; a few weeks prior to that incident, Armaud Arbery, a jogging Black man, was chased and shot. Over the next few months of summer, Mr. Arbery’s and Mr. Floyd’s killings were ones that weighed me down. However, as time went on, and especially with the verdict the following September, Breonna Taylor’s death continued to live inside of my skin like a splinter that’s lodged too deep. Breonna’s case didn’t receive as much attention as the other cases, for whatever reasons—Malcolm X did say the most disrespected person in America is the Black woman—and indeed, we didn’t watch her die, like we did George.
I’ve grown to despise how tragedy serves as a unifier, but it’s part of the human condition, I suppose. Nina introduced her rendition of Miriam Makeba’s “West Wind'' as a prayer written by a dear friend. There are a few versions of this song that I’ve heard. There’s the studio version, a peppier, straightforward, and lushly orchestrated rendition at under 3 minutes. And there is another version, a slightly slower funkier version, with a different melody. Just like we adjust a prayer to a specific situation, all these versions are reinterpreted and reworded, improvised and maybe even an occasional grunt for emphasis, to artfully intreat the god of the moment or follow the movement of the spirit, as it were. Nina of course, is no stranger to the leading of the spirit. With increased intensity of the drums carrying the song away, she urges over and over, “Unify us, don’t divide us!”
Black History Month in 2021 felt like it carried a current weight after all the protests, proclamations, verdicts, violence, tears, and tear gas. I work in a school on the east side of Columbus, Ohio that has a diverse student body, and in previous years I have used Black History Month to educate on issues such as implicit bias, microaggressions, and cultural appropriation. This year, I didn’t even bother. I recorded about 40 hours total of conversation with members of my community: poets, cultural critics, gardeners, foragers, restaurant owners, genealogists, visual artists, biracial students, first generation immigrants, and more. And I listened, and grieved, and sang, and body-rolled, lovingly side-eyed, and reaffirmed, and shared our own stories, the way that we wanted them to be told. I never want to spend another February caring about anything but Black narratives.
Here’s the narrative I want to tell about Breonna: In February 2020, Breonna Taylor finally ended her on again, off again relationship with Jamarcus Glover, an often incarcerated drug dealer. Among her last tweets was a message about setting a good example: “Gotta watch how you let men treat/deal with you especially when you got lil sisters/cousins looking up to ya!!” She had bought a new car a month before, tweeing, “2020 deff gonna be my year WATCH!” she tweeted. She herself was on an upward swing of reinvention. She wrote during her senior year in a scrapbook: “Graduating this year on time is so important to me because I will be the first in my family to accomplish this…I want to be the one who finally breaks the cycle of my family’s educational history. I want to be the one to finally make a difference.” Years later, at her job at the Frazier Rehabilitation Institute, Breonna showed up 20 minutes early nearly every day. Her mother, who claims Breonna was a better version of herself, recalls her daughter writing goals on every scrap of paper, quoting her as saying, “I want to have this done by this time.”
--
“Who Knows Where the Time Goes” is a slow and wistful folk song from that time, and before Nina performed it, Nina contemplated,
Sometime in your life, you will have occasion to say, ‘What is this thing called time?’ What is that, the clock? You go to work by the clock, you get your martini in the afternoon by the clock and your coffee by the clock, and you have to get on the plane at a certain time and arrive at a certain time. It goes on and on and on and on. And time is a dictator, as we know it. Where does it go? What does it do? Most of all, is it alive? Is it a thing that we cannot touch and is it alive? And then, one day, you look in the mirror — you’re old — and you say, ‘Where does the time go?’
And then Nina proceeded, the guitar insisting on a steady graveness, her solo beginning with a trill and flourishing into simple falling phrases. She finished the song with a declaration, determined and desolate: “But I am not alone as long as my love is near me / And I know it will be so till it’s time to go / All through the winter, until the birds return in spring again / I do not fear the time.”
Nina escaped to Barbados a few months after the release of this record. She left behind a husband-manager, Andrew Stroud, who offered little to no support for Nina’s passion for Civil Rights and abused her physically. She left behind a music industry from which she felt punished for the release of Mississippi Goddam, which was banned from many stations and boycotted from sales. She left behind a country that had turned its urgency away from racial relations and towards the Vietnam War, a country for whom she had thrown her voice, body, and career on the line, a country that she had discovered wasn’t and couldn’t be home.
Conceivably, it was to all these three that the next song, “Assignment Sequence” was addressed: “The song is called the assignment…talks about the lover's gap…That gap between lovers…Especially in marriage and other forms.”. Nina sang about freedom many times over the years, and with these words she became unfettered from everything to she had tirelessly owed her love and time for so long: “You want me to see you / Baby I cannot see you / You want me to come for you / I cannot come for you / Cos you want an assignment / I see no concession…My spirit is taking flight now.../ Oh don't you know /There are things I can't do for you / My mind is on its way Another way now for today.”
--
Breonna had been trying to set herself free from the back and forth with Mr. Glover for a while, before she solidified a relationship with Kenneth Walker, her boyfriend at the time of death. This long-term entanglement, coupled with surveillance from a system that was actively working against her, proved to be a deadly combination. After one stint in prison, Mr. Walker told Breonna who to contact to arrange his bail, and added that after he was released, he would “come get me some rest” in her bed. Breonna was no stranger to weariness. “I ain’t really been sleeping, for real, either,” she told Mr. Glover on a phone call he made to her from jail. “When you around, I stress more,” she told him. “Because I just always be worried about you, with the police.”
On March 13, 2020, Breonna had just finished four overnight shifts at the hospital where she worked as an emergency room technician—and was expecting a call at 11 P.M. for a fifth one. The call never came, so she stayed in and had a relaxing night with her boyfriend. She fell asleep next to him just after midnight, only to rise for a few moments and leave this earth not even 45 minutes later.
--
Though I have the privilege of still living on this earth, I feel like I’ve experienced tiny little deaths and departures from my younger self just last spring, albeit a fraction of Breonna’s brief but eternal sleep and Nina’s departure from white America.
I spent the first few months after all the headlines about Breonna focusing on the white people around me, holding their hands and guiding them a la magical Negro, as they seemed to struggle with the idea of racism as if it was an altogether new and foreign concept. Moreover, we were all in quarantine and I felt that I had the emotional capacity to do so, almost like a calling. I put the entirety of my energy into educating white people. I taught race classes at church and focus groups, produced video content for an arts residency and my school, and developed curriculums.
This all changed when the verdict of Breonna's murder was announced. I remember laying on my couch, frozen in shock, stone cold faced, nary a tear, breathless. One by one, I let go of all racial educational commitments and by February of 2021 I had none left. The openness I possessed until that point shut with a thud, and I haven’t recovered even now, and I know that I never truly will.
I can’t speak for all Black women, of course, but in my personal experience, being a Black woman in America can be an exhausting experience. Black Gold was a symphony of Nina’s fatigue; these days, it’s a gift to me, almost a lullaby from my ancestor. And as for Breonna, it’s a new pill for us Black women to swallow—a nightmare—the possibility of murder while at rest.
“To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” was the last song on the album, written by Nina in memory of her dear friend Lorraine Hansberry, author of a play by the same name. She explained: "It is not addressed to white people primarily. Though it doesn't put you down in any way...it simply ignores you. For my people need all the inspiration and love that they can get."
I love that when Nina said, my people, I know she meant Breonna, and I know she meant me. “My people need all the inspiration and love that they can get,” Nina preached on that day. Yes, Nina, and amen. We do indeed. And I do. Every moment, I do.
--
I know there are a million texts about the connectivity of Blackness, but my favorite one as of now is by a musician named Tobe Nwigwe, who rose in popularity after the release of a single “I Need You To”, with a simple message to arrest Breonna’s killers. A few months ago, on a Sunday, he released a single in which he screams with a congregation of similarly clad brethren, “If you Black, we N’Sync, Bye, Bye, Bye.” I sat in my car outside of my church gig and worshipped with them while my cheap car speakers blared in the hot heat. I was in sync indeed. At that moment, I knew that Mr. Nwigwe was my brother, as well as all those melanated brothers, family, sisters, unknown to me.
So, to you, Nina, my sister, I am eternally grateful. I thank you for being my guiding light in a world in which you don’t quite belong, in a world in which I don’t feel I truly belong either. Nevertheless, you took it and made it your own, several times over, and showed me, through it all, how to rest.
And to you, Breonna, my eyes well up with tears every time I say your name. I’ve never grieved like this for a stranger, so it only makes sense that you would be my family. I actually haven’t prayed to God in a long time, and if I did, I’d pray that you were still here, smiling and serving your community, like I know you wanted to. I love you, my sister, and I think about you every time I lay me down to sleep. Bye, bye, bye.
Sharon Udoh is a queer first-generation Nigerian-American pianist, composer, vocalist, educator, actor, and cultural critic. Her work, whether original or through the lens of Nina Simone, focuses on how humans change over time, the necessity of personal revolution and connection, and emotional curiosity. Her performances are magnetic, dangerous, and kind; they embody the richness of complexity, absurdity, empathy, chaos, and the struggle and freedom of Black individuals in America and worldwide.