Biography

This chapter tackles the common recourse to biographical and documentary information to make meaning out of Simone’s performances. Facts prove to be a strange measure of a life, and few lives really steer into a single territory designated as fact or fiction. The things we’re trying to know about Nina Simone can never be known perfectly, and can never quite be known in the way she knew them, because we’re the ones trying to do the knowing, because our ways of knowing are ineluctably partial, and because ethical listening requires that we make room for some amount of opacity. We can treat our projections responsibly without pretending—indeed, by not pretending—that responsibly means objectively. This chapter considers songs including “Mississippi Goddam,” “Stars,” “Images,” and “Four Women.”