Bootleg Thursday: Nina Simone - December, 1977

I posted far too few "Bootleg Friday" pieces this year. So I'm going to try to make up for it this month. Enjoy.

It took me a long time to like Nina Simone. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her voice. I did. A lot. But I found her music sanctimonious, arrogant, and even humorless. She sounded so “above it all” to me. It was obviously soul music, but it was soul with an edge that made me uncomfortable, in possession of none of the “everybody join in, everyone's invited” spirit of Otis, Aretha or James.

But then I read about her life, and I got her anger. I read about how at her first piano recital at age ten, her parents were made to move out of their seats and to the back of the hall. (Simone wouldn’t play until her parents were moved back to their original seats.) I read about her emotional troubles (she was bi-polar for roughly forty years), her estrangement from the United States, and her fury at what happened to the Civil Rights Movement. It was in that context that I got her music – music that demands it be gotten on its own terms, and no one else’s. She created unreasonable music.

The following selections are from a legendary show in December, 1977. In exile from the U.S., Simone plays for a worshipful crowd, but does not give them any of her most popular songs (“Young, Gifted and Black,” “To Love Somebody,” “Mississippi Goddam”). It’s music filled with fire that still burns - with anger, resentment – and yes, laughter and love as well. And it's a fire that sounds dangerous to me, even thirty years later. But I think that Nina Simone would have liked that - because she was never interested in the established order of anything.

Download: "Balm In Gilead" 12/77
Download: "Balm In Gilead (reprise)" 12/77
Download: "Rich Girl" 12/77
Download: "Little Girl Blue" 12/77
Download: "The Other Woman" 12/77
Download: "Turning Point" 12/77
Download: "Pirate Jenny" 12/77
Download: "Pirate Jenny (reprise)" 12/77