“We had Nina.”

Ann blogs about Nina Simone:

There is a quotation attributed to Richard Pryor that states that: “White people had Judy Garland — We had Nina.”  Nina Simone (born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, 1933-2003) was a masterful, superb singer-songwriter, pianist, arranger, composer,  goddess, a civil rights activist, “High Priestess of Soul”, and a beautiful woman the likes of which the world will never see again. There are so many of her songs that I love, including, “Four Women” (a song of four different women who epitomize America’s racist, sexist mistreatment of black women), “Mississippi Goddamn” (a scathing indictment of white America’s racist mistreatment of her black citizens), “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”, her black ballad which would become Black America’s national anthem,  “Strange Fruit” (her inspiring rendition of the legendary Billie Holliday classic), and my favourite, “My Baby Just Cares For Me”, a song that is an homage to the beauty of black women (ironically the song appeared in a Chanel No. 5 commercial decades ago).

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