From jazz superstar to civil rights activist and beyond, NINA SIMONE’s 1960s were a dazzling, defiant decade of profound transition and accomplishment. On the eve of what would have been Simone’s 90th birthday, we chart her journey from Greenwich Village folk clubs to her ascension as the High Priestess of Soul. “She was able to pull down a kind of psychic energy,” hears Stephen Deusner

NINA SIMONE

“CAN you feel it?” Nina Simone asked the crowd of 40,00 0 gathered on a muddy soccer field in St. Jude, Alabama, a suburb of Montgomery. “Can you see it?” Those were lines from a song she’d written, “Mississippi Goddam”, but on this night in March 1965, the questions she posed sounded more optimistic. This was, she understood, a pivotal event for the Civil Rights movement and she was excited to be part of it. Many in the audience had endured violence and abuse to march the 50 miles from Selma to the state capital and their perseverance galvanised Simone. She may have shared the bill with more established acts like Sammy Davis Jr, Harry Belafonte and Tony Bennett, but most agreed that her short set reflected the conflicting emotions of the marchers themselves: hope and despair, joy and anger, determination and weariness.

Usually when she played “Mississippi Goddam”, Simone accompanied herself on piano, but it was impossible to haul such a cumbersome instrument out into the muddy field, so her only accompaniment that night was her trusted guitarist and lifelong collaborator Al Schackman, who deployed jazzy riffs to punctuate her vocals. “When we played as a duo, we weren’t bound by the rhythm of the bass and drums,” says Schackman today. “We could go in any direction. That was to me a highlight of playing with Nina. ‘Mississippi Goddam’ is quite a profound song, with a sinister undercurrent to it. It sounds so jolly, but then it drops down into a minor key, with hound dogs nipping at your toes.”

Those hound dogs had been nipping at them all day. Simone, along with Schackman and her husband/ manager Andy Stroud, had been on a commercial flight to Montgomery, but the governor had blockaded the airport with firetrucks, which meant they were rerouted to Jackson, Mississippi. Undaunted, they chartered a small plane for the last leg of their trip. In Alabama, they were under constant guard by federal marshals. “We had to run through a police line to get to the stage,” says Schackman, “and Nina was just yelling, ‘Get out of my way!’ She was amazing.”

In the woods just beyond the fields were members of the Klan and even local law enforcement, all ready to make trouble if the opportunity arose. Schackman recalls an even more foreboding sign as he set up his amp and guitar: “The stage was built out of plywood sheets. I was looking for a place to plug in. One of Belafonte’s musicians told me to check under the curtain. I lifted it up and saw all these coffins! The stage was built on wooden coffins donated by a local black funeral home. I told Nina about it, and she said those coffins were for all the rednecks.”