According to Carrol, it didn’t take long for Nina Simone’s audience to find her. “They knew she was a star,” he said. “It was not a pop place. It was an intimate place. And immediately, word got out of this tremendously talented pianist and singer. And from then on, every night we went there, the place was crowded. Couldn’t get in. Everybody heard about Midtown. For the serious music lovers, Midtown became the spot. No talk and no whispering, just music.”
“A cult was developed right then,” said Simone in 1986. “Kids who were working as waiters in Atlantic City, in these hotels and things, heard me playing like this at the nightclub and they filled it up every night and made everybody be quiet.”
From her very earliest performances, Nina was apparently able to hold a crowd’s interest fully—much more like a classical or sophisticated jazz artist, playing for people who are there to listen, than a conventional pop or lounge act, happy to provide background music for the drinking, socializing, and flirting that are the priorities for most bar patrons. The fact that she was able to establish this hierarchy so quickly would lead to an expectation that it was how all audiences behaved, which of course was soon followed by her disappointment and frustration that it wasn’t always so.
Though she was playing from 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. every night, with fifteen-minute breaks each hour, Nina discovered that she was having no trouble filling the time. In fact, having the opportunity to explore these songs so freely was unlocking for her new ways of thinking about music.
“All the time I was practicing, I’d practice Bach and Beethoven and Handel and Debussy and Prokofiev,” she said. “Man, all the talent that I had inside me, that was created from me, songs that I should have been composing, I didn’t know anything about those songs until I first started playing in a nightclub. Then, all of a sudden, the fact that I had to play five hours, I started improvising—but I didn’t know I could improvise like that. I was repressed to the point where I hadn’t played any songs of my own for fourteen years, and I didn’t even know I had them down there. I didn’t know until I first started at the Midtown Bar, and it came out.”
But even though she was finding some interesting possibilities in her nightclub work, Simone still felt that the environment was a waste of her gift. “I felt dirtied by going into the bars,” she said. “That made me feel dirty. To me, it was so inferior to classical music that it was like water falling off a duck’s back to play ‘Little Girl Blue.’ That was just nothing. That’s why I infused it with ‘Good King Wenceslas,’ to give it some Bach in the background.
“The popular world was nothing compared to the classical world. You didn’t have to work as hard, and it was easier to please an audience. All they wanted to get was the words. It was just another world.”
After the summer in Atlantic City, she returned to her routine in Philadelphia, teaching in her storefront and studying with Vladimir Sokoloff. But the next year she returned to the Midtown nightclub, where she found a cluster of fans waiting for her, including a college student named Ted Axelrod, who was working as a waiter for the summer. Axelrod, who was gay, had become her first dedicated fan, and at her late sets much of the room was filled with his friends after they got off their dinner shifts. These were the aesthetes and outsiders of the Jersey Shore scene, the community who would make up the core of Nina’s following for years to come. (One of the other outcasts who became a fan at this time was a young Jewish man named Shlomo Carlebach; he went on to become a Hasidic rabbi, and a highly fictionalized version of his friendship with Simone was the basis for 2007’s Off-Broadway production Soul Doctor.)
One night Axelrod, a record collector, brought in a Billie Holiday album for Simone and suggested that she learn one of the songs, “I Loves You, Porgy,” from the Gershwins’ pioneering opera Porgy and Bess. Ever the dutiful student, she practiced it the next day and added the song to her set that night. She’d included it mostly as a favor to her friend (she was never a big fan of Holiday’s), but when she saw how well the audience responded she kept it in.
After her second summer at the Midtown, Simone had become so comfortable as a performer that she asked the agent who had first gotten her the gig if he might find her some work in and around Philadelphia during the year. He booked her into the Pooquesin club, which led to more work at local supper clubs like the High-Thigh Club. The audiences were older and wealthier than the Atlantic City crowd but not as attentive as her devoted collegiate following—they were just looking for some simple dinner entertainment to impress their dates, and they often chatted through Simone’s sets.
This kind of behavior was something that she wouldn’t tolerate for long, but it was more lucrative and more rewarding than accompanying young vocal students. She even thought about reapplying to Curtis, now that she had some more funds to pay her way and wouldn’t be dependent on a scholarship offer. The major drawback, though, was coming clean with her parents. Since she was now playing in public more than just seasonally, and much closer to home, Simone finally had to stop hiding behind her stage name and tell them what she was really doing for work.
“It had been our secret that she was playing at a nightclub,” said Carrol. “And we discussed who was gonna tell Mom. I said, ‘Well, eventually I’m just gonna tell her, get over the shock. This is crazy.’ I had been the one who always said, ‘Forget all that other mess. Do what you’ve gotta do. You’re an artist. Mother would have to change or not change, but do it anyway.’ ”
As had been the case when Nina was growing up, former aspiring musician John Divine Waymon—her more lenient and tolerant parent—was immediately supportive of her new direction. “Our father was real pleased,” said Carrol. “That’s why they had that secret bond. He thought it was great, and he knew what the life was about. It’s dangerous but also okay. Mom didn’t know anything about all that. If you don’t know about it, it’s dangerous until you know what it is.”
Though Simone explained that she was performing mostly classical music and spirituals, and that she never drank anything stronger than milk in the clubs, Mary Kate Waymon didn’t spare her daughter from her disapproval. Simone felt that her mother never accepted the fact that she was playing the devil’s music in dens of iniquity.
“Mom always said that my grandmother [hid] her albums under the mattress,” said Lisa Simone. “I don’t know if that was true, but the message was that Grandma did not approve of what she was doing. And that even though the whole world revered Nina Simone, she still could not have the blessing of the one person whose blessing meant the most.”
Simone had started to make some progress with her career. She made some demo recordings and played in more upscale venues like the Queen Mary Room in the Rittenhouse Hotel. Despite such professional advances, though, she felt alone and adrift. But just as she was most lonely, she found some new company; there was now a man in her life.
Simone met Don Ross—a white self-styled beatnik, aspiring painter, and drummer—at the Midtown in Atlantic City. “He was one of the people who came and befriended me,” she said. “He was at the bar every night and I was lonely and drinking milk. I was very shy. And he befriended me and got rid of my loneliness.”
Ross worked as a salesman, a “pitch man,” selling trinkets to fairs and boardwalks. It’s difficult to get a sense of Simone’s attraction to the man; those around her were asked about Ross only many years later, and no one seems to have a good thing to say. Carrol Waymon called him a “charlatan,” and Simone’s sister Frances said, “I couldn’t stand him. Don was a leech.”
If this courtship with Ross seemed to be leading nowhere good, in August of 1957 Nina Simone was introduced to someone who would go on to be perhaps the most consistent and stable relationship she ever had. Al Schackman was a guitarist who had recently returned from the army and was living in New Hope, Pennsylvania. He was working as a session musician in New York, playing with R&B acts like the Drifters, the Isley Brothers, and Solomon Burke, as well as performing with his own jazz group in the Village. He had worked with Billie Holiday and Burt Bacharach, and with comedians like Mike Nichols and Lenny Bruce.
That