March 20 marks the vernal—or spring—equinox, although some residents of northern climes may not have felt a shift in the weather yet, along with others in warmer locations where “spring” is something that happens elsewhere. Even so, spring is a major subject in literature, poetry, and of course, in song. Spring is also often likened to rebirth and renewal. While gathering music for this installment of #BlackMusicSunday, I ran across a song from Nina Simone about spring that I hadn’t heard in years. It struck a chord in me and my feelings in these days of war, pandemics, and open, often deadly, racism against Black folks.
I often remind readers (and myself) about the healing nature of music. There are days when I am not sure I want to get out of bed, and don’t even want to look at the news. Add the various personal health issues I am facing (like so many others), and I often hear dirges in my head. The cure: Switch the mental playlist to one that offers some hope and uplift.
Listening to Nina Simone led me back to her other songs centering spring. Join me as we celebrate not just songs about spring, but Simone herself.
“Another Spring” was the Simone song that struck that chord in me this week. Arts journalist Michael Sumsion offered his thoughts on the song in 2017, for Vinyl Chapters.
Opening with a strident flurry of splashing jazz piano chords, as if she’s tentatively feeling her way into the psyche of the character in the song like a method actor, ‘Another Spring’ commences with the bleak, wintry imagery of lonely old age: “Yeah and for a little while well I don’t care/If my days are coming to an end/And just as soon be gone sometimes”.
The song moves through an elderly woman’s account of her current predicament and the life she once had; her children have moved far away and left her alone in her home, talking to herself in a rocking chair mourning the man who left. Her life is laid as bare as the stark, chilly streets outside.
Yet Spring arrives at her door one morning and with Nina’s gently whispered “And then…” the mood of the song swings from one of solemnity and disconsolate anger to pellucid joy, then finally serenity and acceptance. The arrival of a tambourine engineers the upward shift to three uplifting stanzas of supreme power and majesty, laced with the stirring cadences of gospel – this is genre-bending as only Nina can do it.
Sumsion points out that the song, and the album it’s on, titled Nina Simone And Piano!, were commercial flops. As we all know, though, sales do not equal merit or quality.
As a woman approaching her 75th birthday, I could identify with the powerful spoken opening, which merges seamlessly into song.
“Another Spring” (Lyrics and music by Angelo Badalamenti, and John Clifford)
Old people talk to themselves
When they sit all 'round all day
This old woman I knew
I used to go over there and sit with her
And she'd be sitting around
In a rocking chair talking to herself
And she used to say she used to say
Sometimes the cold gets in my bones so bad
Till I just don't think I can go
Yeah and for a little while well I don't care
If my days are coming to an end
And just as soon be gone sometimes
Sometimes the night comes down on me
And I know what's ahead
An evening in this cold old house
With no one to say goodnight to me when I go to bed
An evening in this cold old house
With no one to say goodnight to me when I go to bed
Sometimes
I wonder why I stay
What am I waiting for
My children are grown and gone away
They got children of their own now
Don't need me anymore
In winter when the streets are bare
There ain't nothing much to see
I just can't help missing and thinking
About that kindly man
That one old winter time came
And took away from me
And as a gardener with a bird feeder in the yard watching early snowdrop flowers and crocuses peeking out from under the soil, the song’s ending reminded me of the joy and gratitude I should always express—for simply being alive.
And then one morning
Another spring is there outside my door
Things are blooming
Birds are singing
And suddenly yes well I ain't sad
Ain't sad no more ain't sad no more
When it's warm and the sun is out
It's like my heart's restored
I've had my love I've had my children
And I have so many memories
So don't mind me complaining
What the years may bring
Cos this old world has been fine with me really
And I'm thankful for seeing another spring
It's gonna be better this time another spring
It's gonna be groovier this time another spring
It's what's happening this time
So I'm thankful for letting me see another spring
A hearty thank you goes out to Ms. Simone and the songwriters for this musical gift.
Speaking of crocuses, giddy feelings evoked by the flowers and broader thoughts of spring are the subject of “It Might As Well Be Spring,” the 1945 Academy Award-winning Rogers and Hammerstein song from the film State Fair, which has been covered hundreds of times by musicians from a wide range of genres.
I’m as busy as a spider spinning daydreams,
I’m as giddy as a baby on a swing.
I haven’t seen a crocus or a rosebud
Or a robin on the wing,
But I feel so gay—in a melancholy way—
That it might as well be spring…
It might as well be spring.
Here’s Simone’s take:
While listening to Simone, I was taken back to a time a few years ago when I was still teaching at SUNY New Paltz, and none of the students in one of my classes had ever heard of her or her music. With that in mind, I was pleased to see current efforts to preserve her legacy and a place in our history, as reported this week in The New York Times Style Magazine.
The story opens describing efforts by artist Rashid Johnson to preserve the home of W.E.B. Du Bois in Ghana, then segues into exerting a similar effort for Simone here at home.
Five years ago, Johnson partnered with three other prominent Black American artists — the conceptualist Adam Pendleton, the abstract painter Julie Mehretu and the painter, collagist and filmmaker Ellen Gallagher — to help bring another towering ancestor into focus: the genre-defying musical performer and civil rights activist Nina Simone. Simone’s childhood home, located in Tryon, N.C., a small town of 1,600 nestled at the base of the southern escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was at risk of succumbing to age and neglect. Once the artists were made aware of this, they bought the house, for $95,000, in 2017. The following year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated it a national treasure. […]
NINA SIMONE WAS born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on Feb. 21, 1933, in the 660-square-foot house at 30 East Livingston Street. Simone’s mother was an ordained minister and domestic worker; her father ran his own dry-cleaning business and worked as a handyman. Modest though the home might seem today, back then it embodied the promise of prosperity. The Waymons’ plot of land afforded them room for a vegetable garden. They enjoyed other small luxuries, as well, as described in Nadine Cohodas’s 2010 biography, “Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone”: a stove in two of the three rooms to keep the house warm during cold months and to heat water for bathing; a small pump organ where Eunice picked out her first notes; a swing in the yard; even a tennis court just across the street. The exercise of segregation was more nuanced in Tryon than it was in large metropolitan areas like Charlotte and Atlanta, but it nonetheless exerted itself as a palpable lack. Simone, her parents and her siblings (she was the sixth of eight children) lived in the home until early 1937, when her father suffered an intestinal illness that left him incapacitated for a time. The next several years were itinerant, the family moving to close to half a dozen now-forgotten homes in and around Tryon.
Those early years on Livingston Street established Simone’s foundation as an artist. “Everything that happened to me as a child involved music,” Simone wrote in her 1992 autobiography, “I Put a Spell on You.” “It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.” Her mother, Mary Kate, sang church songs to her daughter; her father, John, introduced her to jazz and the blues. By the time Eunice was 4, she was accompanying her mother on piano as she preached Sunday sermons at St. Luke C.M.E. Church.
I’ll close this tribute to Simone’s springtime explorations with this cut from an album she had nothing to do with—Nina Simone with Strings—released on the Colpix label in 1966 after she had left it (and rereleased by Cornbread Records in 2019). Though not all of the collected songs feature strings, it was a popular gimmick at the time: Many great musicians got marketed “with strings”; Simone would be no exception.
Here, she sings “Spring is Here,” a popular song composed in 1928 by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Lorenz Hart, for the musical I Married an Angel.
Though I’ve highlighted Nina Simone today, I have a very long list of songs for spring from Black artists to share, and I’m sure readers have even more. So now that “spring has sprung,” meet me in the comments for some more sounds of the season.