Nina Simone's Daughter Revealed What The Singer Was Like Behind Closed Doors
From “I Loves You, Porgy” and “Feeling Good” to “I Put A Spell on You,” the incomparable Nina Simone is responsible for some of the greatest songs of the 20th century. Then there’s that unmistakable voice: “Sometimes I sound like gravel, and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream,” she once said. Her influence and importance cannot be overstated, but behind all that talent lay several demons. Nina’s daughter has now revealed what her superstar mother was really like behind closed doors.
The Amazing Nina Simone
Nina first started making waves on the Atlantic City club scene of the 1950s playing various blues and jazz classics. Toward the end of the decade, she began recording her own material, resulting in the seminal debut Little Girl Blue.
Over the next ten years, Nina released a string of equally celebrated classics such as Wild Is the Wind, Silk and Soul, and the aptly-titled The Amazing Nina Simone. And she became something of a covers maestro, making much-loved favorites from The Beatles and Bob Dylan entirely her own.
Young, Gifted, and Black
Although she was hailed as the High Priestess of Soul, Nina believed her music was far too diverse to be categorized so neatly. In her memoir, she wrote, “If I had to be called something, it should have been a folk singer, because there was more folk and blues than jazz in my playing.”
Songs such as “Mississippi Goddam,” “Four Women,” and one of her signature tunes, “Young, Gifted, and Black,” meanwhile, put her at the forefront of the civil rights movement of the mid-1960s.
She struggled with her mental health
Disillusioned with the segregated state of the nation, Nina moved around the world before finally taking up permanent residence in southern France. Various financial, behind-the-scenes, and mental health battles kept her out of the spotlight for much of the 1970s.
But she enjoyed success with a 1980s reissue of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” and a 1990s memoir named after one of her greatest hits, “I Put a Spell on You.” And Nina remained a popular live draw up until she retired from the stage at the turn of the century.
A checkered personal life
Sadly, Nina had something of a checkered personal life. In 1961 she walked down the aisle with Andrew Stroud, a cop from the Big Apple. But he proved to be anything but the perfect husband, subjecting her to both physical and mental abuse on a regular basis.
The pair also had a daughter, Lisa. Yet Nina, it turned out, didn’t exactly take naturally to motherhood. In fact, she left her only child behind when she moved from Mount Vernon to Liberia.
A strained mother-daughter relationship
In 2023 Lisa gave an interview to The Guardian in which she discussed her relationship with her late mother in depth. And the picture she painted was a complex one. Lisa, who now resides in Arizona with her husband, acknowledged that there had been some good times in her childhood, recalling the dressing-up sessions she and Nina had used to enjoy when she was a youngster.
“My mother had a three-way mirror, so if I angled the sides I could see about ten of me on each side, and she let me put on her wigs and high heels,” Lisa said.
Always playing music
“We were always playing music,” Lisa continued. “Whether it was hers or Miriam Makeba or Otis Redding, so I’d sing and dance with my selves in that mirror in her bedroom. It was Heaven for a little girl.”
She also remembered how the pair would often play the piano together, adding, “Mommy told me she never considered herself a singer. I looked at her like she had two heads. I thought: tell that to the millions of fans who love you.”
Messy divorce
But these harmonious times soon became few and far between when an eight-year-old Lisa had to deal with her parents’ split. The youngster relocated to a Manhattan home with her mother that overlooked Central Park and had every material possession she could possibly desire.
But when it came to giving love and affection, Nina was found wanting. “She was angry,” the singer said about her mom, adding, “She was dealing with the pain that goes with a messy divorce, and she lost the business foundation she had relied on, and that’s a lot. You’re just so raw.”
Calm on the outside
Sadly, the only way that Nina dealt with this pain was by lashing out at her daughter, both emotionally and physically. Lisa recalled, “I internalized a lot of things. I was very calm on the outside but on the inside, I wasn’t.”
Nina would also implore her to shed tears during her violent attacks, something which she tried her best not to do. The vocalist explained, “She called me Robot. If you let Mommy know you were hurting, she would take advantage of that. I became numb to a lot of things.”
Competition, not curiosity
“I think my biggest mistake was to grow up,” Lisa said while trying to come up with an explanation for Nina’s horrific behavior. She continued, “As you begin to ripen, as girls do, that relationship with your mother can shift.”
“And if your mother is not in a secure position herself, it’s very difficult to watch your daughter start to look like a woman and not feel challenged, like there was a competition. That’s how she felt, so that’s how she treated me, as opposed to a young girl asking questions because she’s curious.”
Beautiful outside and inside
Lisa refuted the suggestion that Nina was intimidated by her daughter’s appearance. She said, “My mother was a very beautiful woman, outside and inside. Period. No matter what she went through, what she carried, how she exhibited it, she was beautiful.”
“My dad was half-Black and half-white with smaller features, and I inherited those features. A lot of mommy’s unresolved issues with her features and how she was treated and what she was told as a child would come out on certain days when she was looking at me.”
More famous in death
Lisa also insisted that her mom had no desire to have lighter skin. But as the music icon explained in her memoir I Put A Spell on You, she did often envisage how life would be different if she had been a Caucasian male.
In fact, Nina believed that her talents would have been far more appreciated if she had been. Lisa said, “She had to fight for everything. And now that she’s dead, she’s more famous than she ever was when she was alive.”
Life at risk
Lisa felt even more isolated when she relocated with her mother to Europe in the mid-1970s. In fact, as Nina’s behavior continued to get more volatile, she started to worry that her life might be at risk. Although the singer had told Lisa that her father didn’t have any love for her, the youngster still headed across the Atlantic to escape.
“Finally, I said to her: ‘I’m going to see Dad in New York, and I’ll prove to you that he loves me like I’ve been telling you all this time, or I’m going to prove to myself that he doesn’t, like you’ve been telling me,’” Lisa recalled.
Alone in New York
In a rather heartbreaking turn of events, Nina’s assertion proved to have some substance. Within just three days of Lisa touching down in New York, her father asked her when she was flying back home to Europe. And this proved to be the final straw for the isolated youngster.
She recalled, “I felt if I went back to Switzerland I wouldn’t survive. He went out one evening with his girlfriend to the opera and I just felt everything come down on me.”
Avalanche of emotion
Lisa then went on to open up further about what must surely stand as one of the darkest days of her life. She said, “I was looking through the bathroom medicine cabinet for something I could take because I thought that would be the best option.”
“I had pushed so many things down, then this avalanche of emotion descended. I had allowed myself to feel, and I didn’t want to feel. In that moment I just wanted everything to stop.”
Family-friend savior
Luckily, Lisa didn’t take any of the pills she’d found in the medicine cabinet. Instead, she made a phone call to Carolee Prince, a friend of the family who also served as her mom’s designer; she managed to talk the youngster out of taking any drastic action.
Lisa also explained to her dad about how bad things had got back in Switzerland and he allowed her to spend the next 12 months at his home in the Big Apple before she moved in with her aunt.
“Iambic pentameter”
Lisa didn’t come face-to-face with her mom for four years from the age of 14. And they didn’t even communicate that often, either. She explained, “I could count on two hands the amount of times we spoke in those years, and when we did speak on the phone, she wasn’t very nice.”
“There was a lot of putting me down and putting other people down in an attempt to lift herself up. And she could curse, honey! It sounded like iambic pentameter, baby, in terms of the poetry, but she could use some vernacular!”
“Like swallowing broken glass”
Lisa was therefore taken slightly aback when her mother unexpectedly showed up at her graduation ceremony. Due to all the family troubles she’d experienced, the teen hadn’t done as well in her exams as she perhaps might have otherwise, and she missed out on a place at college.
Instead, Lisa decided to sign up to the U.S. Air Force. “I didn’t do it to spite her,” she claimed before adding, “But the more I saw her discomfort the more I enjoyed the moment, and the more I talked about it the more it was like she was swallowing broken glass.”
Under the thumb
Yet Lisa’s military career was interrupted when she fell pregnant with her first child. She subsequently got hitched, too. Lisa told The Guardian that she feels she missed out on her early adult years, remarking, “I wasn’t ready to be a parent.”
“And I didn’t even allow myself a chance to be a young adult, because I went from being under the thumb of other people, to being under the thumb of the military, to having the responsibility of children.
Anguished yelp
Despite going on to have a further two children, Lisa still managed to carve out a ten-year career in the U.S. Air Force before she decided to abandon any further military ambitions. In her early 30s, she decided that it was about time she followed in her mother’s footsteps and pursued a career in the music industry.
Unfortunately, Nina wasn’t exactly the most supportive of parents. In fact, on hearing the news the “Ain’t Got No Life, I Got A” singer had apparently let out an anguished yelp!
Strong self-belief
But much to her credit, Lisa didn’t let Nina’s disapproval get in the way of her showbiz industry dreams. She went on to land parts in several productions on the Broadway stage including Aida, The Lion King, and Les Misérables.
In a 2016 interview with the Belfast Telegraph, Lisa said, “I didn’t think being ‘the daughter of’ would stand in my way, and I didn’t think I needed it to open any doors either, because I always believed in myself.”
“Training program”
And eventually, Lisa found the strength to reconnect with her troubled mom. But this was with a particular caveat. The talented singer explained during her chat with The Guardian, “All these years I’d been trying to live in her world on her terms.”
“And I made a decision that it was now time for her to live in mine. Because in my world everyone feels appreciated. So I put her into what I considered a training program on how to love me.”
Absorbing things like a sponge
So what did this training program involve exactly? Well, Lisa told Nina that she would no longer stand for any insults or any attempts to dampen her spirit. She added, “If I called her and she was being the way she’d always been, I would simply not continue the conversation.”
“I’d say, ‘Call me back when you feel better.’” She added, “All these years I’d been absorbing things like a sponge and I’d never told her, ‘When you step on my foot, it hurts. Please don’t do that.’”
Motherly pride
Lisa also tried to encourage Nina to act in a similarly considerate way toward the rest of her family. It was a program which the singer tried to stick to until her death, and one which helped to repair her turbulent relationship with her only child.
In fact, at some point during her “training,” Nina had accepted that it was about time she started supporting Lisa’s musical endeavors. She subsequently attended several of her Broadway shows and vocally expressed her pride at her daughter smashing it on the stage.
Tinkling the ivories
The pair also began jamming together like they had used to back in Lisa’s early years, with the younger Simone taking vocal duties and the older Simone tinkling the ivories. Reminiscing about these happy days, the former said, “She was like, ‘Okay, what d’you want to hear?’”
“And I said all the songs I wanted her to play. She was so touched that I knew them. She said, ‘All these years when we were at odds, I thought that you didn’t play my music.’”
Support act
Lisa went on to add, “And I looked at her and said, ‘Mommy, that is the part of you I always had with me. And I played them over and over and over again. Of course I know those songs.’” Further proof that the pair’s relationship was stronger than ever came in 1998 when Nina asked Lisa to be the support act for a date at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
But she still couldn’t resist laying down a few ground rules first, telling her daughter that she wouldn’t watch her set and insisting that her own should be ignored, too.
Liquid Soul
Lisa didn’t get the chance to spend much time with Nina during her mother’s final years. After all, not only did she have a burgeoning musical-theater career to maintain, the singer had also joined Liquid Soul, a band which at the time was making waves on the acid jazz scene.
But having patched up some of their differences, Lisa was still left distraught when Nina passed away from breast cancer at the age of 70 in 2003 at her Carry-le-Rouet home.
Unresolved stuff
“When she died we were on very good terms, but there was still so much unresolved stuff in my heart,” Lisa said. “I was angry with her for a long time for dying before my vision and fantasy of what our relationship could be was real.”
To pay tribute to the mom with whom she’d had such a complex relationship, Lisa changed her stage name to simply Simone. She explained, “When Nina died, Lisa died, too.” But that wasn’t the only way in which her mom shaped her future career.
Big-band tribute
In 2008 Lisa got the chance to make her first LP as a solo artist. But it came with one stipulation: her record label had insisted that she recorded a tribute album to her mom in a big-band style. Although unconvinced at the time, Lisa had decided to go ahead with it anyway. Luckily, she was more enthusiastic about the results.
The singer said, “I was still grieving my mother, so I was afraid when I got into the singing booth. But I just loved it. It was so cathartic. And I’ve been enjoying singing her ever since.”
Beacon of positivity
In 2013 — a full decade after her mom’s passing — Lisa relocated to the same French house her mother had spent her final years in. The move appeared to inspire her creatively, as she recorded three studio efforts during her time there, including 2016’s My World.
Discussing that record with the Belfast Telegraph, Lisa explained that she wanted it to serve as a beacon of positivity. She said, “We are all one in this world, and we have so much depth that unites us, so much more than that which divides us. So I have written some songs about the human experience.”
Quite a mouthful
Lisa continued, “Twenty-something years ago, when I decided I want to do this for a living, my mother was like, ‘Why?’ So I asked God to help me inspire love and positivity in others from the stage, with examples of my own life. I was 28 years old, and had no idea quite what a mouthful that was.”
But this creative streak also caused problems with her own family. Following a difficult 12-month stint at boarding school, her youngest daughter had decided to return to America along with her father.
Constantly at loggerheads
When asked why she hadn’t joined her loved ones across the pond, Lisa explained, “Because I’m at a stage in my life where the window won’t stay open forever. My daughter will go to college soon; my husband travels a lot. I don’t want to be home twiddling my thumbs.”
But this isn’t the only family ordeal that the singer has had to endure. Echoing her strained relationship with Nina, Lisa and her oldest child Joe have constantly been at loggerheads with each other.
Estranged with pain
Lisa explained, “No matter how much I attempted to make different choices with him, we still came to the same place I did with my mom. Now, how did that happen? I didn’t want it to, I tried to make different choices, I was cognizant.”
“And yet! And yet! Here we are, still estranged, still with so much pain between us.” But perhaps speaking from experience, Lisa chooses to believe that Joe’s attitude toward her only comes from a place of love.
Reclaiming her name
Lisa’s relationships with her own offspring may have suffered during her eight years in France. But her extended Gallic stay did at least help her to achieve some closure when it came to her relationship with Nina.
And as a result, she decided to take back the stage name under which she’d previously worked. The artist now known as Lisa Simone told The Guardian she now believes that she’d fully earned the respect of Nina by the time her mom passed away.
“Sweep the awards”
“My husband was next to her every time she saw me in a Broadway show and she was one of my biggest fans,” Lisa said. The artist formerly known as Simone then recalled one of the compliments Nina had given to her directly.
She began, “I once said to her, ‘I’m going to sweep the awards, Mommy, watch, I have that much talent.’ And a few years after that I wasn’t feeling particularly talented, and she said to me something I’ll never forget.”
Letting the tears flow
A clearly emotional Lisa, who by this point was fully letting all the waterworks flow, went on to explain, “She said, ‘I look forward to seeing you sweep the awards and walk down that red carpet, my baby girl, because you are that talented, and I believe in you.’”
“That meant the world to me, and it still does.” And the fact that she and Nina had managed to repair their relationship somewhat before the latter’s death has provided some extra comfort.
Keeper of the Flame
Lisa went on to finish her interview with The Guardian with some touching words. She said, “I’m the only person on this entire planet who calls Nina Simone ‘mommy.’ And I do so with joy and with pride.”
“And with a sense of knowing who I am, where I come from, and how I carry on this legacy today.” And the singer has helped to do this by staging a show at London’s Cadogan Hall titled Keeper Of The Flame: A Daughter’s Tribute to Nina Simone.
A different chapter
Lisa’s attitude toward her mother must have changed significantly in the seven years between her interviews with the Belfast Telegraph and The Guardian. In 2016 while chatting to the former, she had said, “I don’t want to continue focusing on my mom’s legacy, either.
“I want to find my own place. For too long, I have been trying to navigate the quagmire of my mom’s dirty water, if you will. No more. A different chapter, please. It’s about me now.”
“Tainted from the beginning”
It’s crystal-clear, though, that Lisa doesn’t want the 2016 biopic Nina to be part of her mother’s legacy. The film, which starred Zoe Saldana as the legendary singer, had been made without any input or blessing from the Simone family.
And Lisa told Time magazine that it distorts the real picture, remarking, “The project has been tainted from the very beginning. Clearly, it is not the truth about my mother’s life. This is not how you want your loved ones remembered.”
“I’m Nina Simone's daughter”
Lisa no doubt would recommend the feature-length documentary that had been released a year earlier. The singer served as producer on What Happened, Miss Simone? It had tackled everything from Nina’s civil-rights activism and marriage problems to her various anger issues.
That last element was a trait that Lisa admitted to the Belfast Telegraph that she had inherited, adding, “Of course I’ve been angry. I’m Nina Simone’s daughter. That’s who I come from. That’s why I’ve had so much work to do.”