Darnell Andrews
Marc Settembrino
Soc 411
Film Review
What Happened To Miss Simone
“What happened to Miss Simone” is documentary of the life Nina Simone. It explains how she began playing the piano at the age of 4. She had aspirations of becoming the first African American classical pianist and later stated that she believed she “would’ve been happier.” The documentary explains how she didn’t exactly fit into a world that was exclusively black or white. The only reason she was invited into the white world was because she provided a source of entertainment. This was obvious to Ms.Simone when her parents had to sit in the back of the audience during one of her earlier performances. She was trained and molded to be a classical pianist by the woman who her mother worked for and a piano teacher named Mrs.Mazzanovich.
Her real name was Eunice Waymon and the women named a fund after her. She used the money saved from the fund and moved to New York after she graduated high school to attend Juilliard. When the money from the fund ran out, she began playing at a bar in Atlantic City that required her to play “the devils music.” She created Nina Simone as an alias because she didn’t want her mother to find out how she was surviving. She entered into a relationship that later turned abusive with a man, Andrew, that was to be her husband during the height of her career. Her daughter supposed, “She had a love affair with fire.” Ms. Eunice never gave up her dreams of being a classical pianist but she never pursued a career in it.
She wrote ”Mississippi Goddamn” as a response to the bomb explosion at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that included the death of four black girls. Ms. Eunice began using music as a way to get her feelings out about the institutional and blatant racism that she had experienced for a very long time. Her songs were a representation of her involvement with the Civil Rights Movement. As a result, her career took a drastic turn. When Waymons was booked for gigs, the majority of the songs were about problems of the social world. She eventually left the country and her husband claiming that America was too toxic and needed a change. Ms. Waymons was forced to return back to show business once she realized that her money supply had to be consistent enough to survive. Her mental health was slowly deteriorating over the years because of lack of medical knowledge during her time. She checked herself into a mental hospital earlier in her career to figure out why she would have random outbursts of anger. With the range of knowledge available at that time, doctors were unable to recognize that she had a mental instability. She was diagnosed with a disorder later on in her life. The medicine that was prescribed to her had serious side effects but for the most part it kept her from having fits of rage due to her condition.
The film teaches us a little bit about intersectionality without exactly specifying it. It gives us an unbiased, detailed account of her life, from which, I was able to garner an idea of how she experienced the world from being a poor black woman to an influential black woman. She was in the center of the Civil Rights Movement and I am only now learning about it. That was symbolic for me about how the world has historically pushed women, black women especially, and their accomplishments to the back burner. This documentary also gives us an idea of how she experienced the Civil Rights movement.
Institutional racism is prevalent in the film. Such as Eunice’s trip from her home in the “black ghetto” to the white neighborhood simply by crossing railroad tracks. The textbook explains the black ghetto as “a racial institution marked by social isolation and economic vulnerability first formed when blacks emigrated north during the early twentieth century” (142). She experienced a culture shock as she became acclimated to their environment. She was born into the Jim Crow era and was unaccustomed to seeing those who were not the same skin as herself and her parents. Segregation was very much prevalent at this time. She describes Ms.Massanovich as being an anomaly to her. Ms.Eunice was unused to white people being pleasant and mentions being surprised by it. The book states that, “Black disenfranchisement was safeguarded not only in law but also by white terrorism. Between 1930 and 1950, 33 blacks (that we know of) were lynched in Mississippi” (93). She wrote “Strange Fruit” as a response to this situation.
The media companies who decided to make sure that no one played her music simply because of the politically charged messages that she decided to incorporate into them. I figure that this was a result of institutional racism and those in power not wanting her to further provoke the riots that were happening across the nation. The political songs that Ms.Simone so selflessly sabotaged her own career with were very descriptive of the tendency of nonwhite American citizens to be disproportionately marginalized. Her song “Mr.Backlash” spoke of the hardships due to the class struggles that often apply to nonwhites, such as the issues of they housing not being up to par.
After watching “What happened to Miss Simone”, I gained a better perspective of her attitude and music than the one that I originally obtained. Her intersectional view of how she experienced the social world was extremely interesting to me. My heart aches for the very spirit of Ms.Simone. I believe that she deserved more from a world that she fought selflessly to improve in her own way. “She was not at odds with the times. The times were at odds with her.” This is especially true because of the amount of medical knowledge that doctors possessed when she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital. They told her that she was okay to the best of their knowledge and her mental health slowly deteriorated because of it.
I learned that I did not believe that musicians could be revolutionaries. The way that the documentary described her and her activities was a way that shocked me. I didn’t expect her to be a musical genius but I was completely in awe of how she incorporated her music to go along with the Civil Rights Movement. I believe that I can be a perpetrator of the colorism that spreads so thoroughly throughout the black community. I learned this about myself because I made rash judgments about Ms.Simone, perhaps when I had a different mentality, and I stuck by those judgments even though I knew nothing of her. Learning about Nina Simone was an eye opener and a very needed piece of a puzzle that I needed in my life. In her, I saw a kindred sprit or a belief that we have one. I want to do the things that she has done but obviously in my own way. As in, I would like to take a stand for what I believe in and shake the world up with my words. Her words have inspired me. I could learn a lesson about standing up for myself and demanding respect form Ms.Simone. She demanded respect in more than one area in her life, but the most prevalent to me were those times when she was on stage and refused to play until it was completely quiet.
Eunice Waymons, Nina Simone, was a musical genius but also an extraordinary person. Any person who decides to stand up for what they believe in, no matter the consequences, is extraordinary, in my opinion. The world can stand to learn many lessons about how the world effects marginalized groups of people from Ms.Waymons.
Works Cited
• Garbus, Liz, Amy Hobby, Justin Wilkes, Jayson Jackson, Igor Martinović, Rachel Morrison, Joshua L. Pearson, and Nina Simone. What Happened, Miss Simone?, 2016.
• Desmond, Matthew, and Mustafa Emirbayer. Race in America. W.W. Norton & Company, 2016.