Four Women: An Ode to Nina Simone

My skin is black

My arms are long

My hair is woolly

My back is strong

Nina Simone didn’t write many of the songs she sang, and yet they are all hers.

Born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina in 1933, Simone was able to play her first full song on piano at the age of two and a half. Simone’s mother was a Methodist preacher and her father an ex-entertainer. The two established a nurturing atmosphere for Simone’s budding musical prowess, while encouraging her goal to be the first black-female concert pianist.

Though Simone’s piano training was strictly classical, in order to work she was forced to sing in nightclubs, and with no other way to make money and practice piano, she began to sing. Her vocals were a hybrid of the blues, jazz, and soul while playing songs across the genre spectrum, including pop standards, showtunes, and gospel. Her lack of conformity served as a reflection of the Civil Rights Movement and the increasingly de-segregated 1960s, celebrating the unification of differences and proving complexity and variety transcended homogeneity.

The changing political atmosphere and increased vocalization for black liberation during the sixties were crucial in developing the Nina Simone persona that goes down in history as justifiably livid and discerningly honest. The turning point for Simone was the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963 that resulted in the murder of four young black girls. Simone’s outrage led to her most remembered protest song of retaliation: “Mississippi Goddam.” The song demonstrated Simone’s ability to articulate an often-sushed truth, reflecting the experience of feeling like there is a target on one’s back from being black in America. Towards the end of the song’s swirl of fervor and outrage Simone sings, “You’re all gonna die and die like flies,” which had to be censored when performed for a majority white audience at Carnegie Hall to use “We’re.”

Many of Simone’s most celebrated songs aren’t inherently political, as the maintenance of her career (and marriage) waged a war between speaking her mind and shutting up. As the years went on Simone found it less and less possible to hold back from commenting on the violence and mistreatment cast on her people, one of the reasons leading to her divorce in the early 70s and deteriorating mental health. Like many of the great leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, Simone sped up to burn out. Because of this, some of her best examples of story-telling and songwriting get lost amongst her glorious, yet surface-level covers. One such song is “Four Women,” released in 1966, the same year as the official formation of the Black Panther Party.

“Four women, four negro women, each one with a different color, each one with a different grade of hair, and one of the women’s hair is like mine,” Simone said as a preface before performing the song in Holland in 1965. “Four Women” tells the story of Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches; four women of color who have been hung out to dry under the lingering, suffocating shadow of American slavery.

Simone spends seven lines of each of the four verses to color the background and disposition of each woman. Aunt Sarah’s back is “strong enough to take the pain/ Inflicted again and again.” Safforina is mixed and feels stuck between two worlds because her “father was rich and white” and forced her “mother late one night.” “Who’s little girl am I?” asks Sweet Thing before she answers “anyone who has money to buy.” Finally Peaches, who’s “manner is tough” says she “is awfully bitter these days/ Because my parents were slaves.” In such a short space Simone is able to singularly focus on the truth of the neglected, pulling at the heart strings without the crutch of poetic language.

When she belts “Peaches” for the last time before the song trickles to a close, Simone releases a suppressed anguish due to centuries of brutality and constraints against women of color, starting from her own recollections as a young black girl growing up in the Jim Crow-South. Simone flourishes in her ability to convey staunch emotion through her voice, elongating one word long enough to make it emote several sensations at once. “Four Women” showcases not just her ability to control her voice with the precision of an artist’s brush, but to present fully articulated capsules of the disenfranchised. She points a spotlight on those whom white America prefers to shove in a corner (or cell) combined with the passion of her own experience in a way few have done so poignantly.

When Simone utters the first syllables “My skin is black” it is not a statement of observation but of freedom. She embraced herself and broke the chains of self-hatred to the best of her ability, and in doing so allowed a new generation to do the same.

The High Priestess of Soul simply gave us her sermons. All we have to do is listen.