Home > Work > What Happened, Miss Simone?: A Biography
1 " Trained as a classical pianist, she was often called a jazz singer, but it was a label she deeply resented, seeing in it only a racial classification. She grudgingly accepted the popular nickname “the High Priestess of Soul” but gave it little significance. If anything, she claimed, she was a folk singer, and her dazzling, unpredictable repertoire—Israeli folk tunes, compositions by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, songs by the Bee Gees and Leonard Cohen and George Harrison, traditional ballads, jazz standards, spirituals, children’s songs—is perhaps unmatched in its range. "
― Alan Light , What Happened, Miss Simone?: A Biography
2 " She may have discovered how to solve the problem of aviation in music. What makes an aviator what he is? An aviator is a person who deals with getting heavier-than-air objects off the ground. She could do that, musically and emotionally. She could take a feeling and actually lift it off the ground, and it would stay there. "
3 " There is something about a woman,' said comedian and activist Dick Gregory. “If you look at all the suffering that black folks went through, not one black man would dare to sing ‘Mississippi Goddamn.’ Not one black man would say what Billie Holiday did about being lynched [in “Strange Fruit”]-they wasn’t lynching women, they was lynching men, but it was women that talked about it, and nobody told them to talk about it. No manager going to tell you to talk about this, it’s just something inside them. "
4 " If you’re striking at the heart of five thousand people, there’s more being plugged into you,” said Simone. “There’s more electricity coming from you, because you’re getting it from them and they’re getting it from you. It’s like when lightning strikes a town, or a hurricane or a tornado, it builds. If it’s getting ready to capture or to hurt thousands of people, it comes stronger as it goes through the oceans and the waves get bigger—it gets stronger all the time, because it’s been building wave by wave by wave all that time. That’s the way I think of myself. "
