Topic: Political versions
Nina Simone wrote one of the bluntest protest songs in 1963: "Mississippi Goddam." [1] More than a decade passed between then and her recording of "Come by Here," years in which the demand for civil rights moved from being given equal access to educations to demanding equal time for the African-American experience in history and literature classes.
Academics, both Black and white, began researching the history of slavery: the memoirs collected from ex-slaves during the depression by WPA workers like Ruby Pickens Tartt were consulted and published. Other scholars began more systematic studies of the African past. And, starting in the middle-1960s, American Blacks began making pilgrimages to the ancestral continent. [2]
Spaulding Givens became part of the African revival movement. He played piano for Charles Mingus in 1951, then began experimenting with native instruments and changed his name to Nadi Qamar in the 1960s. [3] By 1971, he was playing oud and thumb piano for Simone at Carnegie Hall. [4] He and her longtime collaborator, Al Schackman, accompanied her on "Come by Here."
She included it on the last commercial album she made, It Is Finished. She had become increasingly disillusioned with life in this country after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, and left for Barbados in 1972. Simone recorded it on a brief visit to the United States in 1974, before she relocated to Liberia.
Her verses were ones popularized by the Civil Rights movement (somebody’s dying, praying), but her musical interludes were duets by the western piano and African thumb piano. Rattles were the primary rhythm instrument. They may have been attached to the mbira, much like the zis on a tambourine.
The textual structure probably came from her childhood experiences in the Colored Methodist Episcopal church [5] in western North Carolina where her mother was a minister. [6] She treated it as an open-ended song in which she sang the "come by here" verse three times, the "dying" verse twice, and the other quatrains once.
The stanzaic sequence was superimposed on a musical pattern that alternated two vocal repetitions with a musical interlude. The intensification of the interludes may also have come from the church. She told a Canadian interviewer "the gospel singing that I heard in church influenced me tremendously, and that’s no one person, that’s a real and a feeling, a rapport that you get in a big audience when you can’t hear anything but rhythm." [7]
Several of the songs on the album wrapped her political commentary in religious imagery, especially "Dambala." One verse of "Come by Here" may have been an allusion to her own problems with the government: "I’m on trial Lord." [8] The mere selection of this song may have been a merger of the religious, the political, and the personal. She had been deeply affected two years earlier by the deaths of her father [9] and the older sister [10] who took care of her while her mother was busy. [11]
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Nina Simone
Vocal Accompaniment: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: Nina Simone, piano; Nadi Qamar, thumb piano; Avram Schackman, guitar
Rhythm Accompaniment: piano chords and rattle; audience clapped along after the last interlude
The thumb piano or mbira was an African plucked instrument made from tuned bars attached to a sounding board. It usually was placed in or on a resonator like a box or gourd. [12] Traditionally the bars were fashioned from bamboo, but now are metal strips. The tones lingered a brief time, contributing to the unique sound. [13] Some musicians placed shells or pieces of metal on the keys or board. [14]
It developed in southeastern Africa and came to its greatest development among the Shona in what is today Zimbabwe. Around 1900, it was taken to Nigeria. [15] It had many local names. Qamar used the Ugandan term likembe, which appeared in French Congo popular music in the early 1950s. [16]
Credits
Written-By – Trad. [17]
Arranged By – Harold Wheeler, Nina Simone
Public Domain
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: come by here, I’m on trial, dying, praying
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: I, somebody
Pronunciation: she emphasized the /s/ in "please come by here," did not pronounce the terminal /g/ of "dying" or ‘praying,’ and pronounced the /d/ in Lord very softly.
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: I’m on trial
Format: open-ended
Verse Repetition Pattern: AxBxBAA
Line Length: 9 syllables
Special Features: none
Influences: She attended the Allen School while Claire Lovejoy Lennon was superintendent. [18] With a two decades gap between her graduation in 1950 and her recording and, and the intervening popularity of other recordings, it is impossible to know if her version had any connection with the unknown one of Lennon.
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: alternated an instrumental section with two vocal verses four times (IVV-IVV-IVV-IV). Each time the instrumental interludes marked an increase in rhythmic intensity. The guitar played the melody in the introduction. In the second interlude, Simone played the melody in chords against the rhythm of the guitar and thumb piano.
Singing Style: generally one syllable to one note, with the exceptions of Lord in "come by here good Lord come by here." Whenever she sustained a tone, she treated it with vibrato. The number of sustained notes increased in later verses.
Notes on Performance
Applause after the third instrumental section and at the end indicated it was a live performance. She probably made several appearances in 1974, including one in Canada when she was interviewed by the CBC. The only one I have found mentioned on the internet was a solo concert at the Newport Jazz Festival. [19] The liner notes only said it was remixed in New York City.
Audience Perceptions
In its 1974 review, an Ebony writer wrote: "She creates a mood of camp meeting exultation on Com’ By H’Here Good Lord." [20]
Notes on Performers
Both Simone and Odetta were encouraged as young girls by white patrons to aspire to roles in classical music. However, Odetta, as mentioned in the post for 16 October 2017, suspected the dream was a chimera and looked for an alternative career in the folk music revival clubs on the West Coast. Simone believed she could make it as a concert pianist, and was bitterly disappointed when Curtiss Institute did not accept her after she had spent time at Juilliard. Her move into jazz nightclubs on the East Coast was driven by the need to eat. [21]
She was working in New Hope, Pennsylvania, in 1957, when she met Al Schackman. He had grown up playing Yiddish music, and worked "with a band that played Armenian and Turkish music." [22] He noted he was able to compliment her playing without instructions. As the years passed, the rapport deepened. He remembered once in Holland:
"‘Music is all we have now, isn’t it?’ she said to me. I said yeah ... 85 percent. She said ‘95 percent for me’." [23]
Availability
Album: It Is Finished. RCA APL1-0241. 1974.
YouTube: uploaded by TeddyCool23, 11 July 2011.
YouTube: uploaded by Mikael Sjögren, 3 March 2012.
YouTube: uploaded by Jeroen Verdonck, 24 April 2015.
YouTube: uploaded by Sony Music Entertainment, 24 May 2015.
End Notes
1. Nina Simone. "Mississippi Goddam." Nina Simone in Concert. Phillips PHM 200-135. 1964.
For more information on the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.
2. John Darnton. "Nigeria Evoking a Lost Past For U.S. Black Performers." The New York Times. 28 January 1977.
3. German Wikipedia. "Nadi Qamar."
4. Radcliffe Joe. "Nina Simone." Billboard. 22 May 1971. 22. Several biographies and films existed about Simone. Most were interested in her personal life and discussed the texts of her songs. I did not find any that dealt with her development as a musician.
5. The Colored Methodist Episcopal church was organized by freedmen in 1870 when it became clear they would have no role in the Methodist Episcopal Church South. They changed the name to the Christian ME church in 1956. (Encyclopædia Britannica. "Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.")
6. Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon. According to Alan Light, her mother, born Mary Kate Irvin, "came from a family of preachers (fifteen of them in all, according to Simone.)" What Happened, Miss Simone? New York: Crown Archetype, 2016. No page numbers in on-line version.
7. Nina Simone. Interviewed by Martin Bronstein. The Entertainers. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Broadcast 3 November 1974.
8. She had problems with unpaid taxes. Her husband had been her manager until she moved to Barbados and the marriage ended. (Alan Light. "How David Bowie Helped Nina Simone Out of a Slump." Time website. 11 January 2016.)
9. Simone’s father died 23 October 1972 of pancreatic cancer. (Erica Howton. "Johnnie Devan Waymon." Geni website. 10 March 2017.)
10. Her sister Lucille died in 1972. ("Lucille Julia Waddell [Waymon]." Geni website. 6 December 2016.)
11. Light said Lucille took care of Simone when she was a young child. (What Happened.)
12. Virginia Gorlinski. "Mbira." Encyclopædia Britannica. 12 October 2009; last updated 8 November 2013.
13. Wikipedia. "Mbira."
14. Gorlinski.
15. Wikipedia, Mbira.
16. N. Scott Robinson. "Mbira." His website. This was the best source on the instrument.
17. "Nina Simone – It Is Finished." Discogs website.
18. Lennon and the Allen School is discussed in the post for 25 October 2020.
19. "Today’s Events in the Newport Jazz Festival." The New York Times, 29 June 1974.
20. Phyl Garland. Review. Ebony. December 1974. 30.
21. Wikipedia. "Nina Simone."
22. Al Schackman. Quoted by Ellis Widner. "Simone, Music Director in Perfect Harmony, Schackman Recalls." Arkansas Online website. 17 February 2009.
23. Schackman.
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