February 1966, London
With my focus very much on the exciting events of the past six months – starting the UK Nina Simone appreciation society, meeting Nina, Esther Phillips and Stevie Wonder – I’m starting to feel restless. Going to Kilburn Grammar School is proving tough. My thoughts of becoming a diplomat (for real, that was my career plan after attending university) are fading, replaced by my growing passion for music. I’ve been telling Mr. Kerry, the deputy headmaster at school how I’ve started a fan club for a then-relatively unknown American recording artist and performer. He’s fascinated and invites me to share with my classmates about Nina and why she’s important to me…
The school library is the setting: I’ve chosen to share Nina’s stirring version of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” I explain the song is indicative of Nina’s deep commitment to equality, justice and freedom in particular for Black Americans and how she’s impacted my awareness of the Civil Rights movement. I tell my fellow pupils that ‘Strange Fruit’ is about the atrocity of lynching so commonplace in America’s Klu Klux Klan-ridden southern states. When the song ends, there is dead silence. Then…resounding applause. 1966 and my seventeen-year old London classmates are getting a lesson in awareness…
Decades later, I meet one of my classmates and he doesn’t remember much about me, except that I played that Nina Simone track in the school library and he never forgot how it affected him. I can see that learning algebra and Latin are no longer enough to keep me in school… The world of music from and for the soul beckons….
