Nina Simone - Little Girl Blue (1958)
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Nina Simone (born Eunice Kathleen Waymon; February 21, 1933 - April 21, 2003) was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, and civil rights activist who worked in a broad range of musical styles including classical, jazz, blues, folk, R&B, gospel, and pop.
Born in North Carolina, the sixth child of a preacher, Simone aspired to be a concert pianist. With the help of the few supporters in her hometown of Tryon, North Carolina, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York.
Waymon then applied for a scholarship to study at the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she was denied despite a well-received audition. Simone became fully convinced this rejection had been entirely due to her race, a statement that has been a matter of controversy. Years later, two days before her death, the Curtis Institute of Music bestowed an honorary degree on Simone.
To make a living, Eunice Waymon changed her name to "Nina Simone". The change related to her need to disguise herself from family members, having chosen to play "the devil's music" or "cocktail piano" at a nightclub in Atlantic City. She was told in the nightclub that she would have to sing to her own accompaniment, and this effectively launched her career as a jazz vocalist.
Simone recorded more than forty albums, mostly between 1958, when she made her debut with Little Girl Blue, and 1974, and had a hit in the United States in 1958 with "I Loves You, Porgy".
Simone's musical style fused gospel and pop with classical music, in particular Johann Sebastian Bach, and accompanied expressive, jazz-like singing in her contralto voice.
To fund her private lessons, Simone performed at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, whose owner insisted that she sing as well as play the piano, which increased her weekly income to $90 a week. In 1954, she adopted the stage name "Nina Simone". "Nina" (from niña, meaning "little girl" in Spanish), and "Simone" was taken from the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the movie Casque d'Or. Knowing her mother would not approve of playing the "Devil's Music", she used her new stage name to remain undetected. Simone's mixture of jazz, blues, and classical music in her performances at the bar earned her a small but loyal fan base.
In 1958, she befriended and married Don Ross, a beatnik who worked as a fairground barker, but quickly regretted their marriage. Playing in small clubs in the same year, she recorded George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (from Porgy and Bess), which she learned from a Billie Holiday album and performed as a favor to a friend. It became her only Billboard top 20 success in the United States, and her debut album Little Girl Blue soon followed on Bethlehem Records. Simone lost more than $1 million in royalties (notably for the 1980s re-release of My Baby Just Cares for Me) and never benefited financially from the album's sales because she had sold her rights outright for $3,000.
After the success of Little Girl Blue, Simone signed a contract with Colpix Records and recorded a multitude of studio and live albums. Colpix relinquished all creative control to her, including the choice of material that would be recorded, in exchange for her signing the contract with them. After the release of her live album Nina Simone at Town Hall, Simone became a favorite performer in Greenwich Village. By this time, Simone performed pop music only to make money to continue her classical music studies and was indifferent about having a recording contract. She kept this attitude toward the record industry for most of her career.
Simone married a New York police detective, Andrew Stroud, in 1961. He later became her manager and the father of her daughter Lisa, but he abused Simone psychologically and physically.
FROM WIKIPEDIA: en.wikipedia.o...
Sit there and count your fingers
What can you do?
Old girl you’re through
Sit there, count your little fingers
Unhappy little girl blue
Sit there and count the raindrops
Falling on you
It’s time you knew
All you can ever count on
Are the raindrops
That fall on little girl blue
Won’t you just sit there
Count the little raindrops
Falling on you
‘Cause it’s time you knew
All you can ever count on
Are the raindrops
That fall on little girl blue
No use old girl 👧
You might as well surrender
‘Cause your hopes are getting slender and slender
Why won’t somebody send a tender blue boy 👦
To cheer up little girl blue
Discovered this song while studying abroad to Edinburgh. We were in an Airbnb with a record player and a record of Nina Simone. Suffice to say this song has been ingrained in one of my favorite memories of watching out the window on a rainy day of Scotland :))
This song tell me that some people will not have a Happy Christmas . The tune hits me like a arrow to my heart.
What a exceptional musician Nina Simone was .
How about a little love for the equally exceptional man who wrote those words for her to sing, long after he died of a what they called pneumonia, but it was really a broken heart? And his songwriting partner, who was at times rather a nasty individual, but as Noel Coward put it, somewhat enviously, "The man pees melody."
I bet she had some.
Behind every song ever written worth singing, there's a story. Then a story behind the story. Probably a story behind that.
This is the saddest rendition I've heard to date (and there have been many). Therefore, the truest.
Nina Simone was a marvellous pianist. And I know it has been said ad nauseam, but I so appreciate voices untouched by pitch correction and Autotune.
This work of art really demonstrates to the listener what mastery of the art she possessed.
She was a marvellous pianist. It was claimed that she was destined for a classical path, which her playing often demonstrates. Certainly, she credited Bach with her devotion to music.
She makes you live this song!! and weep!
So gorgeous!!!! More volume than the version she did at the Montreaux Festival album in the 1970's. None like her!!!!!!!!
For the Aztec Princess, though she may not know: her tender little blue boy is here.
I love this lady and her talents. 🤟🥰🙏
It's my song . The guy I loved cheated . I loved him . But he has to go . And I will be Little girl blue.
Just incredible talent
Listening to this...I am lost....lost....away from this world....
What a voice..great
found this whilr lisyening to 91.1 wrty, had to look od up asap
crying
“Little Girl Blue” (1958) - the title track from the debut album by jazz singer, pianist and songwriter Nina Simone, released by Bethlehem Records. Simone was in her mid-20s at the time, and still aspiring to be a classical concert pianist. ua-cam.com/video/mYeYxf0UQB0/v-deo.html
Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra also did covers of this song that I THINK we’re featured on both of their earlier albums? Lol but this song was written and performed in the mid thirties by Gloria insert last name here. She sung it on Broadway. I love the carpenters cover of this song the most. (I am a very huge fan so maybe there is a bias) Burt Bacharach was producing BANGERS back then! 😅 *hot take* I feel like he was the Pharrell/Timbaland of the late 60s and 70’s ❤
Puxa vida...que canção linda! Adicionada às minhas preferidas da vida ❤️🩹
Love this song
My song at present .
It was composed by Richard Rodgers of Rodgers and Hammerstein. I like Janis Joplins version too.
Melancholy😞
Edgar Hoover made sure that we have Cardi B instead of Nina. They won we lost.
?? What did Hoover have to do with Cardi B?
@@Musicienne-DAB1995
Obviously not her directly, but the point is FBI and CIA have a lot to do with what kind of music and musicians are promoted and what are suppressed, much more than you think.
Damn.
She doesn't sing the whole lyric. It's a very unconventional take. And it's devastating. See, Larry Hart wrote most eloquently about the pain that comes from disappointment in love. From feeling rejected, outcast, alone. Depressed, acting out, and given to behavior that often ticks other people off, because no matter how hard you try, nothing turns out the way you wanted. Moments of sheer exhilaration, followed by emotional collapse. (Hart wasn't diagnosed as bipolar, but good bet he might have been, if he'd lived a bit longer--people just called him a drunk).
Who would understand better? Oh sure, she was loved as a singer. An entertainer. It was just as hard for her to find love as it was for a gay dwarf in a time when coming out wasn't an option, and he would have had problems even if that wasn't true.
One outcast reaching down deep to understand another. The songs live on because so many of us can sense the pain behind them. And so many of us have felt the same way. The songs have been adopted by so many people of so many backgrounds, and all of them have something to say with them. It's always the same down deep--"Is there somebody out there who can love me for who I am?"
@@omi_god This is a great singer recognizing a great melody and lyric. Neither of which she was capable of creating herself. A great vocalist, a fine classically trained pianist, and a decent arranger. Not a composer or lyricist of any note whatsoever.
It's the same lyric. Same exact lyric, a few minor tweaks, which of course most singers do with songs they interpret. Nothing new to her.
Most of Hart's best lyrics were written for women to sing, or else for a duet. He understood the woman's POV very well, being gay, and of course, much smaller than most of the men he slept with. And that's why he wrote this lyic for a girl raised in the circus. Named Mickey. I have a bio of Hart, looked it up. That's a girl. Singing about herself. Not a boy singing about her.
Doris Day sang it in the reworked movie version, and it's been a popular woman's song pretty much ever since. Simone isn't responsible for that. I agree the choice of opening music works, but it's mainly just her showing off her piano chops, and isn't in any way essential for the words and music to be moving and insightful. I'd give her version a slight edge on its emotional power, but the song was a beloved standard well before she got to it.
A great rendition--it became one of her theme songs. But she left out the opening verse, which she pretty much always did when she interpreted Rodgers & Hart. The verse that relates to the circus. Carol Sloane used it, and her version rival's Simone's. Less emotionally intense, more insightful, ruminative. Simone tended to channel Hart's loneliness and desire for love into her renditions of his lyrics--she felt the same way herself, even though men were throwing themselves at her, as never happened with Hart.
A lot of Simone's power came from her deeply dysfunctional personality, which let to a lot of sadness, loneliness. She failed as a wife, as a mother, as a friend. Many other great artists could say the same. Hart never married. But every friend he ever had mourned for him.
He was at least as great a genius as her. Sorry you missed it. Your loss. Not Simone's, because she totally got it. She, unlike you, knew great lyrics when she heard them.
@@omi_god I really admire both Simone and Hart. I think they were kindred spirits, in a way. You demeaned him to elevate her, for some reason I could not possibly understand.
But you were wrong. Up there on your high horse, it somehow never occurred to you that sometimes Mickey is a girl's name. You stand correct. And your high horse has unhorsed you. There you lie. On the ground. Looking dumb. :)
@@omi_god Oh, so you didn't type this?
//it's hard to understand why anyone would even bother with Hart's words after hearing this.
The original words are sung TO "Little Girl Blue" as a sort of instruction -//
So you said he wrote lousy words that she somehow made great by playing a snatch of an old English Christmas carol based on a 13th century melody. (You know she didn't compose that, right?)
You also said that he wrote it as a lecture from some man to a woman, when in fact he wrote them to be sung by the woman to herself.
You were wrong. About everything. You did not have the good grace to admit it. And to say Hart's own words belong to someone else--and that you don't even see why she bothered to use them--if that's not demeaning to one of the greatest song lyricists who ever lived--what is?
You didn't make any anti-gay or anti-dwarf cracks, but you know what? I bet you didn't even know or care who Lorenz Hart was, or what pain he might have experienced in his life. You just thought of him as a privileged white male. And that somehow Nina Simone had to get all the credit for the song, simply because she interpeted it beautifully--as others had before her, and since.
You hated that I credited anyone but her--and I sure as hell credited her for the power of her interpretation. But you identify with her--being a talentless person yourself--and disliked any inference that she didn't deserve 100% of the credit.
The fault, dear omi_god, is in your starfucking. And now I am done with you. Type something stupid. So I can laugh at it.
@@christopherlyons5900 You sound crazy.
@@omi_god I understood you perfectly. And you don't lie very well at all. Or read very well.