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Lisa Simone has long stepped out of the shadow of her famous mother, Nina Simone, but keeps her promise to continue her heritage. By Santilla Chingaipe.

Musician Lisa Simone on celebrating her mother’s legacy

Singer Lisa Simone.

Credit: Jen Harris

Lisa Simone and I begin our conversation with the weather. I’m complaining about the start of winter in Melbourne. Speaking from her home in Arizona, she is quick to remind me – as a born and raised New Yorker – that Australian winters aren’t as cold as we make them out to be. “What you all consider winter, I have yet to really experience this as winter in the way that I’m used to it,”she says. “I actually like briskness of the temperatures at this time of year where you are, so I hope you can enjoy it.”

Simone has travelled to Australia on many occasions, performing with her band across the country, and returns for a national tour to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide this month. She says that music has always been part of her life. “Music has been in my family since before I was born,” says Simone. “The legacy – on both sides, my dad and my mom’s – was filled with music. Filled with voices, song, piano instruments... so would be pretty much given, I guess.”

She recalls an early memory. At the age of eight she had to memorise a poem and decided to turn it into a song. “I’m 63 years old, I still remember it.” Simone lets out a joyous laugh. “That was my first composition, okay! I actually composed and arranged this.”

She proceeds to sing:

“I’ve got the wiggly wiggles today, / And I just can’t sit still. / My teacher says she’ll have to get me a stop-me-wiggle pill. / I’ve got the giggly giggles today / I couldn’t tell you why. / But if Mary hiccups one more time / I’ll giggle till I cry.”

Hearing the joy in her voice as she sings the “Wiggly Giggles”, it’s clear how much music means to her. She says she hopes to turn her youthful compositions into recordings for children.

Simone never considered a professional musical career until she was in her late 20s – following a detour in the United States military. A veteran of the first Gulf War – she spent 10 years in the US Air Force and was stationed at Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt, Germany in the ’90s.

During her time in the service, Simone rediscovered her love of music. “In the military is where I adopted Simone into my legal name. It was while I was in the military that people stepped up – who believed in me and gave me an opportunity.” She began performing in various bands and after leaving the military stayed in Germany, running a gym on weekdays and touring across Europe at weekends.

“I got a phone call from my godsister – all the daughters of Malcolm X are godsisters, we were raised together – and so the eldest daughter called me one day out the blue and asked me if I wanted to be a background singer for a Spanish superstar named Raphael Martos,” she says. She accepted the job and left Germany, paving the way for a professional career in music.

Despite growing up around musicians, Simone – born Lisa Celeste Stroud – says she was never encouraged by the adults around her to take music seriously. “I had a lot of talent but ... nobody was saying let’s hone it,” she says. “Matter of fact, it was like crickets. There wasn’t exactly someone there to mentor me. To shape and mould my instrument, like Mommy. When Mommy’s talent was discovered in the town of Tryon [North Carolina], the people of Tryon – Black and white – came to create the Eunice Kathleen Waymon fund to fund her lessons, and they encouraged her.”

“Mommy” was the celebrated African-American singer, pianist and activist born Eunice Waymon, who became popularly known as Nina Simone. A child prodigy born in the segregated Jim Crow south in 1933, Nina Simone began playing the piano during church services at the age of three. When she was six, a local piano teacher persuaded her mother that, given her extraordinary talent, she should pursue lessons.

This continued through high school and, after graduating, Nina Simone moved to New York to attend a summer program at Juilliard. She later applied for a scholarship at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and was rejected, allegedly due to her race. To make ends meet, she began playing piano in bars and singing, changing her name to Nina Simone so that her mother – a preacher – would not find out she was playing “the devil’s music”.

Twenty minutes into the interview, I find myself curious about Lisa Simone’s relationship with the High Priestesss of Soul. She mentions her parents repeatedly – not by name – throughout the conversation and I ask her the question she most likely gets asked all the time: what was it like growing up as Nina Simone’s daughter?

“Ahh, and there’s the question!” she says. I stumble through my words as I cringe: the interview is about Lisa Simone, not her mother. But it’s a question that cannot be avoided and Simone offers a gracious response. “I often counter when I’m asked that question: what’s it like being the daughter of your mother?” she says, conceding that it would have been strange had I not asked. “That would be like a herd of elephants in the room, if someone did not mention my mother.

“We’ve all got legacies,” she says. “Mine might be more well known than others, but we have many parallels that we deal with if your parents are alive in your home and in your relationships. I’m the only person in the entire planet [to call her] ‘Mommy’ and I get it that it can be something that’s difficult for many to even imagine, but she was my mom.”

In the 1960s, Nina Simone immersed herself in the civil rights movement, writing one of the important anthems of the movement, “Mississippi Goddam” and later, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”. In a 1969 interview with Ebony magazine, Nina Simone said, “I hope the day comes when I will be able to sing more love songs, when the need is not quite so urgent to sing protest songs. But for now, I don’t mind.”

Her comment that “an artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times” is featured in the 2015 Oscar-nominated documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? In recent years, those clips have gone viral on social media and are reshared more often in the current political climate. The film also documents Simone’s private struggles and public successes.

Lisa Simone executive-produced the documentary. In it, she talks about the volatile nature of her relationship with her mother, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, experienced bouts of depression and was in an abusive marriage. “People seem to think that when she went out on stage she became Nina Simone. My mother was Nina Simone 24/7, and that’s where it became a problem,” she says.

“When she was performing, she was brilliant. She was loved. She was also a revolutionary. She found a purpose for the stage, a place from which she could use her voice to speak out for her people. But when the show ended, everybody else went home. She was alone and she was still fighting, but she was fighting her own demons, full of anger and rage. She couldn’t live with herself and everything fell apart.”

Nina Simone married Andrew Stroud – a police officer from Harlem who later retired and became her manager – and together they had Lisa. “I loved being a mother. I was a good mother,” Nina Simone says in an archival recording in the documentary.

All children are affected by their parents, but for children of successful or famous parents, living under their shadow can be particularly challenging. Lisa Simone admits her relationship with her famous mother had its “ups and downs”, given the abusive nature of her parents’ relationship and her mother’s volatility, but they remained close until the very end.

Nina Simone died in 2003, leaving behind a musical archive that remains achingly pertinent today. “When Mommy died, my world changed completely and the rose-coloured glasses I didn’t know I was wearing shattered. And my relationship to everything that I knew just became this big kaleidoscope of blurry things – even my own name. I didn’t use the name Lisa for 10 years, and I used to tell people that when Nina died, Lisa died, too.”

She reconciled the complexity of their relationship after completing the documentary, which she says was a “daughter’s promise fulfilled” – she vowed to her mother on her deathbed that she would make sure she was not forgotten. “I didn’t realise that my story was so intricately interwoven with my mother’s,” she says. “Once it was released, then people saw me independently of my mother.”

There is a calmness in how Lisa Simone speaks. She takes her time to answer questions, often pausing before offering a response. It doesn’t surprise me when she tells me she has been practising meditation for 12 years. “I’ve done a lot of inner work to heal that part of myself that was walking around like an open wound for a long time.”

What Simone inherited from her mother – an unquestionable musical talent – has seen her cement her career on her own terms: starring roles on Broadway, Grammy nominations and chart-topping albums. When Lisa told her mother she was pursuing a career in music, it was not received very well. “She paused for so long, I thought our connection had been cut on the phone. And then she said, ‘Why? Why?’ ”

Her father was disappointed as well, but that did not stop her. “It wasn’t until I went on stage in the original cast of Rent on Broadway in the role of Mimi and my parents saw me in such a huge role and the response of the audience – they could stand down, they could relax,” she says. “And from that point on, we could talk shop and I got their blessing.”

I have not seen Lisa Simone perform, so I turned to YouTube to get a sense of her stage presence and voice. Most of the performances are reworked versions of her late mother’s songs, as well as her own original compositions. In one concert, from 2017, Simone’s dreadlocked hair is twisted into Bantu knots, she is dressed in a chocolate-brown sequinned dress and she’s clearly at home on the stage. Many comments cannot help but draw comparisons to her mother, even though they are different artists.

There is a freedom with which Lisa Simone performs – a freedom perhaps her mother could only have dreamt of. Simone has managed to not let the weight of her mother’s success take away from her own – no small feat given Nina Simone’s vast cultural heritage.

Lisa Simone – Nina’s only child – continues to embrace and celebrate her mother’s legacy. “But that’s not all there is to me,” she says. “And that’s what people tend to forget.” She’s quick to manage audience expectations around the show she’s bringing to Australia, Lisa Simone: A Daughter’s Tribute to Nina Simone.

“This is not a Nina show – this is an homage to Dr Nina Simone,” she says. “This is a celebration of her music and an opportunity to see how the legacy lives today. I realise that I’ve been able to walk that fine line.” Not only has Lisa Simone been able to walk it, she’s found her voice and made it her own.

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