Backlash Blues
John Lahr, 16 June 2016
What Happened, Miss Simone? A Biography
by Alan Light.
Canongate, 309 pp., £20, March 2016,978 1 78211 871 8 Show More
by Alan Light.
Canongate, 309 pp., £20, March 2016,
“... Simone’s singing broadcast not just a new sound but a new time. Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Nat King Cole – great black song stylists who emerged out of the 1940s and crossed over into the commercial white mainstream – succeeded precisely because their tone and diction took race out of their voices; they swung but without soul, which made the songs and ... ”