Nina Simone

In Nicole Ashanti McFarlane’s work, she reflects on the musical legacy of Nina Simone through a fittingly polyphonic reading of “Four Women,” in keeping with Simone’s interpretation of the many voices within black women’s political and artistic vocalizing.

The possibility of a creolised planet

In this interview Paul Gilroy talks to Femi Oriogun-Williams about his love of folk music of all kinds. He discusses its songs of expropriation, suffering, soldiering, impressment and migration; its relationship to the countryside - often a dangerous and menacing place - and to Englishness, including English nationalism; and the role of Black performers inside the world of folk, including Nadia Cattouse, Dorris Henderson, and Dav(e)y Graham. He also discusses the cosmopolitan of musicians, and their appetite for music that operates across cultural and national boundaries; the plasticity, pliability and nomadic aspects of musical forms mean that Nina Simone can make a song by Sandy Denny her own, and Kathryn Tickell can experiment with South Asian sources; it allows songs to appear in many different versions, as with 'The Lakes of Pontchartrain'. The folk traditions of the Atlantic world exhibit all of the recombinant cultural DNA that went into them. This creates the possibility of reading the culture of the Atlantic world, North and South, with the idea of a Creole culture - and the possibility of thinking with a creolised planet in mind.

Nina Simone as Poet and Orchestrator

How do you fashion an identity in a society that, at every turn, tries to snuff you out? In this article, I address Nina Simone's praxis of renaming and reinvention to demonstrate strategies of resistance. To this point, I analyze the musico-poetic setting of Nina Simone’s songs “Images” (1964) and “Four Women” (1965) to argue that her artistic musical choices sonically orchestrate varying issues of Black female subjectivity, identity, and self-making. In Simone’s songs, she refuses to discount the materiality of the Black body; instead, she envelops the Black body with signifiance and significance. The sonic bearers of semantic content become extensions of the Self—transmutable and heterodox. The compositional and poetic subtleties in these songs claim that the gaze of the Other can potentiate exteriority and freedom—what I term the “exo(p)tic.”

Incorporating intersectional musicality within the classroom: Black feminism through Nina Simone and Janelle Monáe

In an age of social justice advocacy within education, the work of Black women continues to be excluded from the hegemonic educational canon despite the long history of Black feminists advocating for the eradication of systemic oppressive systems in education. By examining the livelihoods and music created by Black feminist musicians, music educators may begin to reflect on how Black women’s positionality within society has had a direct influence on the music they created within a White culturally dominant society. The purpose of this article is to conceptualize how the intersectional musicality of Nina Simone and Janelle Monáe – informed by the conceptual framework of Black Feminist Thought – can speak to the experiences that Black girls and women face within music education and society.

Step It Up and Go

This book is a love letter to the artists, scenes, and sounds defining North Carolina’s extraordinary contributions to American popular music. David Menconi spent three decades immersed in the state’s music, where traditions run deep but the energy expands in countless directions. Menconi shows how working-class roots and rebellion tie North Carolina’s Piedmont blues, jazz, and bluegrass to beach music, rock, hip-hop, and more. From mill towns and mountain coves to college-town clubs and the stage of American Idol, Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, Step It Up and Go celebrates homegrown music just as essential to the state as barbecue and basketball. Spanning a century of history from the dawn of recorded music to the present, and with sidebars and photos that help reveal the many-splendored glory of North Carolina’s sonic landscape, this is a must-read for every music lover.

Songs of Immigrants and Emigrants

As a crossroads state, North Carolina’s population has more than doubled since 1970. Musical immigrants move here for the same reasons as everyone else: quality of life, cost of living, scenery, inspiration. The influx includes everyone from jazz giant Branford Marsalis to electronic inventor Bob Moog. It runs two ways, however, with African-Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South for brighter futures up North -- Nina Simone, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk among them.