Lisa Simone on Nina’s mother: At 16, she cursed the day I was born

Lisa Simone she doesn’t gloss over her relationship with her mother, the legendary songwriter Nina Simone. “On my 16th birthday, he sent me a card that said, “I curse the day you were born.” At that time I was with my aunt. I didn’t react. My aunt was the one who got angry“, she says to the “Guardian”. Lisa, also a singer-songwriter and Broadway star, has spent a lifetime trying to understand her mother.

Sometimes she loathed the woman who bullied her, verbally abused her and neglected her. Other times he adored the woman who could be fun, tender and caring. And he’s always been in awe of the inspirational artist and activist who represented the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s like no one else. Now, 90 years after the birth of Nina Simone and 20 years since her death, her daughter is her own “guardian-angel”. Next week she is in London to give a tribute concert, singing her mother’s hits.

It’s hard to overstate Nina Simone’s influence. She wrote one of the greatest protest songs (Mississippi Goddam, about the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1963), one of the greatest songs (To Be Young, Gifted and Black, written in memory of her friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, to lyrics by Weldon Irvine) and one of the greatest narrative songs (Four Women). Her performances of classics such as Ain’t Got No/I’ve Got Life, My Baby Just Cares For Me, Mr Bojangles and Stars marked and defined an entire era. Her music went from ecstasy to despair, just as she did.

Born in North Carolina, Nina was the most uncompromising of the famous civil rights activists. In the wonderful film Summer of Soul, about the 1969 Harlem festival that became known as the black Woodstock, we see her inciting the crowd to violent revolution. Her radicalism, her unpredictable behavior and her mental health (she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder) cost her so much commercially. And at one point it almost cost her her daughter too…

Nina Simone was a child prodigy, winning a one-year scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York. She wanted to be the first African-American classical concert pianist, not just a star of the day. However, for her later studies, the Curtis Institute rejected her, destroying her dream. Nina Simone thought she was rejected because she was black. Two days before her death, it was announced that the Curtis Institute would award her an honorary degree.

Lisa lives in Arizona with her husband. She is the only child of Nina Simone and her second husband, Andy Stroud, an ex-cop turned manager, and her happiest memories are of playing in the bedroom with her as a toddler. Often the two sat at the piano. Lisa sang and her mother played. “My mom said she never thought of herself as a singer. I looked at her like she had two heads. I thought: tell that to the millions of fans who love you.” Nina Simone encouraged her in many ways. “She had roots, she was building a life and she was calmer,” she says in her interview.

But the calm did not last. With success and activism came pressures. “She paid a huge price to become the woman we all love.” So does Lisa. When she was eight years old, her parents divorced. She moved with her mother to an affluent part of Manhattan, overlooking Central Park. Materially, they lacked nothing. But her mother had changed. “She was angry. She had lost both her husband and her manager and it was chaos. She was dealing with the pain that comes with a divorce and losing the business foundation she relied on and that had cost her dearly,” she explains.

Nina Simone took out her anger on her daughter. She became violent. Little Liza at the time could not understand what had come over her. “I’ve internalized a lot of things. On the outside I was very calm, but on the inside I wasn’t,” she says with disarming honesty. Her mother begged her to cry when she was spanked, but Lisa refused to give her the satisfaction. “He called me a robot. If you let mom know you were in pain, she would take advantage of that.”

From the age of 14 to 18 she did not see her mother. “I can count on two hands the number of times we talked over the years and when we did talk on the phone she wasn’t very good. She belittled me a lot and belittled other people too, in an attempt to elevate herself,” she recalls.

However, her mother surprised her with her graduation appearance. Lisa was an honors student, but naturally her grades had slipped and she failed to get into university. He told Nina he was going to join the air force. Was this her way of rebelling? “I didn’t do it to upset her, but the more I watched her struggle, the more I enjoyed the moment, and the more I talked about it, the more it was like she was swallowing broken glass.”

Lisa says she was her own worst enemy. At 20 she was married and the mother of her first child (today she has three grown children, whom she adores). She spent 10 years in the army, until she finally resigned to become a professional singer. When she told her mother, Nina Simone responded with an anguished cry: “Why?” Lisa found success on Broadway in the musicals Rent, The Lion King, Aida and Les Misérables.

When asked if she thinks her mother respected her in the end, she replies with a smile: “Yes. My husband was by her side every time she saw me in a Broadway show and she was one of my biggest fans.”

For much of her life, Lisa has struggled with their relationship, but she has finally “reconciled” with her mother. “I’m the only person on the entire planet who calls Nina Simone mom. And I do it with joy and pride and with a sense that I know who I am, where I come from and how I continue that legacy today.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Nina Simone (@ninasimone)