"Jumping the Line"
Re-remembering history
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Freedom Singer Nina Simone (1933 - 2003)

By Dave Marsh

Apr. 23— Sonny Rollins once said that if Nina Simone was a jazz singer, then he didn’t understand jazz. Nevertheless, a lot of her obituaries call her a jazz singer. They also refer to her as singing pop, cabaret, rhythm and blues, soul, blues, classical art song, and gospel.

She had a different idea. “If I had to be called something, it should have been a folk singer because there was more folk and blues than jazz in my playing.”

Maybe that’s true of her piano playing. But her singing, not her playing, defined her. Mainly, it defined her as Nina Simone, sui generis. But if you need a label, try this one: Freedom singer.

The term describes her militant presence in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the way that she sang, both within and without the limits of predictable cadence and melody. More than that, it describes what she sought. Like her good friends James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, Nina Simone made art about wanting to live like a free person. This certainly didn’t mean to live — or to sing — like a white person or for that matter, an American. It meant living, and singing, like a person who not only counted on the promise but lived in the actuality of the American Dream.

Personally, she could be haughty, with audiences as well as everyone else, but once the music started, her hauteur showed its real face: an unshakable, irrevocable commitment to her own self-worth, and by extension, ours, too. This is what Aretha Franklin and everyone else found in songs like “To Be Young Gifted and Black” and it’s what let Simone set “Mississippi Goddamn,” otherwise a “protest” song, to a jaunty cabaret arrangement and fill it with jokes that turn out to be time-bombs. The shadow that she casts across her blues, especially “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” and “Work Song,” represents not so much what it is to live without freedom as what it is to live with the fear of losing the sense of self that allows freedom to exist.

“I wish I knew how it would feel to be free,” she sang, so delicately that it sounds like she feared the concept would shatter from merely being uttered out loud. But she ends that song on an entirely different note: “I sing ‘cause I know how it feels to be free.” In that moment, so does the listener. This tension animates virtually every one of the songs she sang and all of the songs she wrote, starting with “Four Women,” which speaks like a condensed Toni Morrison novel twenty years early.

Her classical training made her wish that she could convey that spirit simply by singing her songs. If you hear her sing “I Put a Spell On You,” “I Loves You Porgy,” or “To Love Somebody,” you know she could-she still stands as the greatest interpretive singer of the ‘60s, pouncing on songs by the likes of Dylan, Leonard Cohen, George Harrison, and Randy Newman with cat-like grace and singularly personal insight. (This week, I find many of them too painful to listen to.) But once Hansberry convinced Simone that joining in the Movement would not diminish but enhance her work, she took off in the opposite direction. No singer-no artist—committed herself or her work to the Movement more fully than Simone, and she followed its twists and turns from the days of Freedom Marches to the less hopeful time of identity politics that lay just on the other side. I Put A Spell On You, one of the great music autobiographies, spends at least as much time conveying her political attachments and adventures as talking about her music career or personal life.

Simone took the treacheries with which the Movement ended so deeply to heart that she went into exile, first in Liberia, then in Barbardos, finally in the south of France. She returned occasionally, always written up as a self-involved diva but, perceptive as always. She found her native country’s racial and political malaise, she said in 1996, “worse than ever.” In that respect, what a mercy that she will not, as planned, tour the US this spring.

Nina Simone hadn’t made an important record or written a well-known song since the early ‘70s, so in a sense her absence will not be widely felt. But she had a song about that, too. “I’ve forgotten you, just like I said I would / Of course I have / Well, maybe except when I hear your name.” The words are Hoagy Carmichael’s. The sentiment is hers. And ours.

Source: CounterPunch

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"Jumping the Line"
Re-remembering history

By Nicholas Holt

Jumping the Line by William Herrick (AK Press 2001)

(AGR)-- Histories -- even well intentioned “peoples’ histories” -- can be depressing, and not simply for the lists of atrocities and tragedies that form the most famous dates on the timeline.

The cast of characters, the great men and women of events both foul and inspiring can seem so giant, so larger than life, that even when one is full of the urge to fight for change, it seems only natural to wait for another great leader to show up and maybe get it right this time.

But the reading of personal histories can be a valuable exercise in jumpstarting the historical player in all of us and a fine way to remember that those who, like Henry Kissinger, insist that “History is the memory of states,” can only make it so if we let them.

In Jumping the Line, novelist William Herrick relates his long life, from his childhood among his extended family (“a raucous mishmash of Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists”) in a working-class Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn to Revolutionary Spain, where he went to fight fascism as a committed Communist, but left, traumatized by his party’s crimes against the revolution and the Spanish people. He also describes his time back home again in the US, where his outspoken criticisms of the authoritarians transformed comrades into enemies — some of whom seek revenge on Herrick to this day.

Herrick has been labeled “our American Orwell,” and indeed, Jumping the Line is a fine complement to Orwell’s own recollection of Spain, Homage to Catalonia. Both books, though in many ways tragic, are inspiring alternatives to traditional histories and are reminders that, however anonymous, there have always been those who struggled against the amnesia of states.

Through out his life, Herrick encountered amazing people, some, like Emma Goldman, Cole Porter, Henry Miller, and Orson Wells, well known, and many more whose names are not so famous, but whose impact on Herrick was no less profound.

Herrick was an involved participant in many of the events of the dynamic struggles of the early 20th century, and recalls his time working as a union organizer in both New York and the deep south, living on an anarchist communal farm in the Midwest, hitchhiking between Hoovervilles, and fighting strike breakers outside a Detroit factory, among many other fascinating anecdotes.

In telling the story of his life, Herrick fills well known events with intimate details that enrich the stories in a manner that even the most capably written history books cannot.

There is a temptation when reading revolutionary history to become stuck in a quick-sand of nostalgia, to sigh with knowing regret about the good old days of flat caps and May Day parades, before rejoining the daily grind here at the end of history like good grownups should.

Herrick does not waste time in that sort of soft-focus nonsense when he relates his past, and for all the enviable experiences he relates, there are many regrets, both personal and for the mass movements of the day, and he mythologizes neither himself nor the fascinating times in which he lived.

Nor does he suggest any sort of historical conclusions, even as his own story approaches its end, tacitly denying the rest of us any excuses for inaction simply because the times are so different today.

The great crimes of the 20th century were often committed by people who sought to make men into gods, who were desperate, like Herrick, to believe a single plan or a single man could have the answers to humanity’s problems. Herrick’s courage to openly refute the secular faith he clung to so desperately is inspiring, and his story a dramatic illustration of the importance of the libertarian vow to have “no gods, no masters.”

“I have a deep, instinctive distrust of power, however it arises,” writes Herrick. “When people start claiming they can save humankind, run like hell. Because before you know it the corpses pile up, and yours may be among them.”

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