#Nina Simone #folk #gospel #blues #jazz #R&B #soul #1950s #1960s #The High Priestess of Soul #The Threepenny Opera #Kurt Weil #Bertolt Brecht
Lotte Lenya’s terrific performance of “Pirate Jenny” in G.W. Pabst’s 1931 film version of The Threepenny Opera might be the most enduring version of the song. One wonders what Brecht might have made of Nina Simone’s rendition of “Pirate Jenny,” which he co-wrote with Kurt Weill in the late 1920s. Simone makes the song her own, not just in the idiosyncrasies of her performance, but in her substantive alterations to the song’s setting, to it's title character and to it's politics. Simone’s version is found on her 1964 LP Nina Simone in Concert.
In Pabst’s film, Jenny sings soon after learning that her erstwhile lover and pimp Mackie Messer has married Polly Peachum - and immediately after accepting a bribe from Polly’s mother, Mrs. Peachum, to betray Mackie to the London cops. Jenny takes the money, tips off the cops and sings. It seems like a desperate, nihilistic moment: an abject woman, amid turbid emotional and ethical crises, articulates a violent fantasy of absolute power. Whose side is Jenny on? Her own, of course, but operating at such an alienated distance from the social is never a good thing in Brecht.
Simone’s performance feeds off Jenny’s anger and abjection, but the social politics of Simone’s revision are more emphatic, even didactic. The import of Simone’s relocation of the song - from The Threepenny Opera’s Victorian London, to “this crummy southern town, in this crummy old hotel” - wouldn’t have been obscure to anyone in the Carnegie Hall audiences in front of whom she recorded Nina Simone in Concert, in March and April of 1964. The American south was then embroiled in civil rights struggle and mounting violence: Medgar Evers had been executed in his Mississippi driveway in June of 1963, and just a few months later, Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, AL. Collins, Robertson and Wesley were 14 years old; McNair was 11.
Simone addressed that violence in another, more famous song on Nina Simone in Concert, “Mississippi Goddam”: “Alabama’s got me so upset / Tennessee made me lose my rest / And everybody knows about Mississippi, goddam!” It’s rightly noted to be a watershed song, signaling Simone’s forceful transformation into protest singer, activist and cultural radical. Her version of “Pirate Jenny” may lack the referential specificity of that other, more storied song (and “Mississippi Goddam” gets pretty direct; at one point in the song, she intones, “Oh, but this whole country is full of lies / You’re all gonna die, and die like flies / I don’t trust you anymore” - in Carnegie Hall). But “Pirate Jenny” is a lively complement to the indignation of “Mississippi Goddam,” and tonally it’s even more bitter, even more violent.
You can hear that implicit violence in the horrific cackle Simone produces at the 3:27 mark, immediately after the infantilizing image of the ribbon in Jenny’s hair. It’s a stirring contrast: the feminine innocent become vengeful fury. You can hear the bitterness in the final “Ha!” that bursts from her throat as she imagines herself disappearing over the horizon line with the ship. You can feel it in one of Simone’s other revisions to the song. In The Threepenny Opera, the song climaxes with Jenny’s shocking order that all the men in London (“Alle!”) should be killed for her pleasure. In Simone’s version, there’s never any doubt that all of her prisoners should be killed, it’s only a matter of how quickly. She hisses, rapaciously, “Right now / Right now!”
In another notable change, Simone’s Jenny isn’t a prostitute, but a maid, cleaning up after “you people” in the aforementioned “crummy hotel.” Jenny is still marginalized, but there’s nothing subterranean or metaphorical about the economic environment she moves through. It’s all culturally sanctioned. Her oppression is a transparent element of her southern lifeworld, and she is thus sharply conscious of the manifest power of those transactions: “Maybe once you tip me, and it makes you feel swell.” It’s an important change to Brecht’s original lyrics, focusing on a set of economic relations that indicate Jenny’s racially charged plight. She’s a maid in a southern hotel, a laboring black woman, who’s made recognizable as such precisely because of the larger Jim Crow-period matrix of law and social practice that determined who did what work for whom.
That economic register makes some of the song’s subsequent images even more resonant. The people on the receiving end of Jenny’s rage are “chained up” on the “dock.” The spectacle of terrified, chained bodies by the seaside evokes the slave auction block, even as the image wants to invert the slave economy’s racialized logic, of white oppressing black. And Simone repeatedly calls the ship in the harbor a “black freighter.” Black freight. It’s another marker for the slave trade, and perhaps Jenny is trying to run the film in reverse. Perhaps she wants to board the vessel, to sail all the slave ships back across the Atlantic, to neutralize the horror of the Middle Passage. That sounds like a utopian desire, a triumphal image that the song’s tone cannot sustain, or even create in the first place. Too much misery and violence has already happened. American history has already insisted that blackness and capital are inextricably bound. Utopian longing is beside the point. What’s needed is critique, sharpened by righteous rage.
The historical period that we call “the Sixties” ground on for another ten years after Simone’s 1964 Carnegie Hall gigs. She became increasingly militant in her public rhetoric and performative style. She claimed once to have looked Martin Luther King in the face and said, “I am not non-violent.” Her voice throughout “Pirate Jenny” is a sort of corroborating evidence for that assertion. From: https://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/post/183632765267/why-brecht-now-vol-ii-nina-simone-sings-pirate
