After various legitimate jobs, Eunice adopted a stage name to ensure her Methodist minister mother wouldn’t find out she was playing “the devil’s music” in an Atlantic City bar (Nina was a pet name given to her by a boyfriend Simone came from French actress Simone Signoret). The surprise rejection left her rudderless and in need of money. Nina Simone – born Eunice Kathleen Waymon – was a child prodigy, and a fund had been set up by people in her native Tryon, North Carolina to help her become the first female black concert pianist in the US. The turning point in her career was a rejection from the Curtis Institute of Music in 1951, which she later came to understand was racially motivated. A panel of 179 experts ranked the vocalists.Few artists have thrived so spectacularly while being so disinclined towards the recording industry, but then few have been as talented as Nina Simone. This is an excerpt from Jonathan Lethem’s introduction to the Greatest Singers of All Time feature in the Novemissue of Rolling Stone. Falling in love with a singer is like being a teenager every time it happens. It’s as if they’ve fooled us into loving them, diddled our hard-wiring, located a vulnerability we thought we’d long ago armored over. If one of the weird things about singers is the ecstasy of surrender they inspire, another weird thing is the debunking response a singer can arouse once we’ve recovered our senses. The beauty of the singer’s voice touches us in a place that’s as personal as the place from which that voice has issued. Those two folks, a handful of others: their soul-burps are, for me, the soul-burps of the gods. Conversely, nothing in the vocal limitations of a Lou Reed guarantees a “Pale Blue Eyes” every time out, any more than singing as crazy-clumsy as Tom Waits guarantees a “Downtown Train.” Yet there’s a certain time-tested sturdiness to the lowchops approach forged by touchstone figures like Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison and Jonathan Richman, one that helps define rock & roll singing.įor me, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, just to mention two, are superb singers by any measure I could ever care about - expressivity, surprise, soul, grain, interpretive wit, angle of vision. How helplessly candid! How appalling!Ĭontrary to anything you’ve heard, the ability to actually carry a tune is in no regard a disability in becoming a rock & roll singer, only a mild disadvantage. Summoned through belly, hammered into form by the throat, given propulsion by bellows of lungs, teased into final form by tongue and lips, a vocal is a kind of audible kiss, a blurted confession, a soul-burp you really can’t keep from issuing as you make your way through the material world. There’s something a bout a voice that’s personal, not unlike the particular odor or shape of a given human body.
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