Finding her voice: Lisa Simone honours her famous mother’s ‘beautiful legacy’
Lisa Simone had a troubled relationship with her famous mother, but now the talented singer is ready to share Nina Simone’s extraordinary musical and cultural legacies with Australian audiences in July.
In 1960, one year after Nina Simone’s Little Girl Blue was released, the poet Langston Hughes struggled to put into words the appeal of Simone’s music and presence – that dusky voice, that unblinking gaze.
“She is strange,” Hughes wrote. “So are the plays of Brendan Behan, Jean Genet and Bertolt Brecht. She is far-out and, at the same time, common. So are raw eggs in Worcestershire.”
Hughes, it turned out, was just getting warmed up.
“She is different. So was Billie Holiday, St. Francis and John Donne. So is Mort Sahl, so is Ernie Banks.” He continued: “You either like her or you don’t. If you don’t, you won’t. If you do – wheeee–ouuu! You do!”
Australia, it turns out, is firmly with Hughes. So great is our enduring affection for Nina Simone and her music that we have embraced her musician daughter, Lisa, with open arms.
When she first toured here in 2023, she sold out a string of shows across the country and next month she returns with A Daughter’s Tribute to Nina Simone, performing in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane in July.
Nina Simone, of course, is regarded as one of the greatest voices of her generation and her influence is difficult to overstate. She penned one of the great American protest songs – Mississippi Goddam, about the 1963 murder of the civil rights activist Medgar Evers – and one of the great celebratory songs, To Be Young, written in memory of her close friend, the playwright (and godmother to her daughter), Lorraine Hansberry.
Lisa Simone’s life and consciousness are forever enmeshed and interwoven with those of her legendary mother
Her peerless interpretations of such classics as My Baby Just Cares For Me, Mr. Bojangles and Stars are so singular that they’re largely thought of as the gold standard for each song.
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Her music, like her life, however, veered between extreme highs and profound, destabilising lows and, just as we are all inextricably bound to our parents, Lisa Simone’s life and consciousness are forever enmeshed and interwoven with those of her legendary mother.
Now 62-years-old, she is all too painfully aware of the complicated legacy she has inherited.
Although incredibly talented, Nina was a difficult and troubled woman, and the two had a massively fraught relationship that was deeply affected by her mother’s emotional neglect and physical and psychological abuse.
As an adult, Lisa Simone has worked hard to forgive her mother’s obvious shortcomings and failures, as well as to embrace her extraordinary musical and cultural legacies. Still, some 20 years after Nina’s death and, even as she now takes the stage and performs the songs that made her mother a legend, she struggles with the many vicissitudes and complexities of their relationship.
“I’ve been a deep meditator for 12 years,” she says, speaking from her home in Arizona. “I went to school for therapeutic meditation and I guess you could say that, in that time, I’ve been my own therapist. When one begins to do the deep work on the cushion, so to speak, you have what’s called a ‘transformation’ and that’s really like a shedding of skins. And when you open one door, once that door is opened, you realise that there may be 10 more doors behind it, you know what I’m saying? There’s a lot there to be dealt with and gone through.
“When my mother died, our relationship was better than it had ever been, and that was because she didn’t realise that I had her in a training program for how to love me. When I realised, I couldn’t run away from her, I turned to face her and to face it – our relationship – and, in doing so, I really faced my mum when I was in my 30s.
“My mother died when I was 40-years-old, but I had to teach her how to love me before that. I literally said to myself, ‘Okay. I’m not going to run away, I can’t, but I’m not going to live in your world anymore. You’ve been the adult, you’ve been the parent, and I’ve been living in your world, but now I’m the adult and you’re going to live in mine, and in my world people treat each other with respect and everybody feels good and appreciated and loved’.”
Lisa Simone’s route to her own musical career was both somewhat circuitous and delayed. Although she had always loved to sing, and had grown up singing at home with Nina, she ended up being in the US military for more than a decade and was posted throughout the US and abroad in Germany.
After being honourably discharged, she decided that it was time to pursue her musical ambitions and toured as a back-up singer for several artists before landing a starring role in the smash-hit musical Jesus Christ Superstar.
The production in which she appeared toured throughout the US and eventually led her to Broadway roles in such acclaimed musicals as Rent, Aida and The Lion King. After nabbing a prestigious National Theatre Award for her performance in Aida, she was cast as Fantine in Les Miserables, and her mother was there for all of it – always sitting beside Simone’s husband in the audience, cheering her daughter on and encouraging her in her musical pursuits.
“My ‘programme’ for my mother lasted 10 years,” she says. “She saw me do a lot and I saw her do a lot and we were on good terms for most of it. I had to find my voice. I had to figure out, ‘Where do I start?’ And I learned that if she was doing or saying things that were going to impact me in a negative way, I just had to walk away from that situation. She was my mother and she knew that she was hurting me, but sometimes you’re stepping on somebody’s foot and you don’t realise. She became more aware of that over time and, as she became aware, our relationship began to shift.
“When you’re a person of her status and her stature, you’re used to being surrounded by people who are telling you ‘yes’. They never tell you that you’re doing anything wrong. They never hold you accountable for your own behaviour.
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“You never really have to think about the way you’re speaking to someone or treating them because they’re not calling you out for it and for the way what you’re saying or doing is making them feel. I started to do that and I think, really, it was the first time she’d found herself in that sort of a position and it was really difficult for her.”
Simone says that her mother’s death from breast cancer in 2003, quite understandably hit her “extremely hard”. She was destabilised by the loss and grieved Nina’s death intensely for five years. At the end of that period, she recorded her first solo record, Simone On Simone, though the project did not evolve entirely on her own terms, creatively or otherwise.
“Record executives insisted I make a big-band tribute album to Nina,” she says. “I wasn’t thrilled. I mean, for a start, I was still grieving my mother and because of that I was very scared when I got into the recording booth, but it ended up evolving really unexpectedly in that I loved it. I absolutely loved it. There was this profound feeling of catharsis and exorcism there and, really, I have loved singing her ever since, even though there was a really long period of time where I was angry with her for dying before my own fantasy version of what our relationship could have been – or what I wanted it to be – could be realised.”
In 2013, Simone moved into her mother’s old house in France in order to experience the life they never shared together there. She wrote songs and recorded three more albums – All Is Well, My World and In Need of Love – living there for eight years.
In 2015 she served as the executive producer on the critically acclaimed Liz Garbus-directed Netflix documentary about her mother’s life and career, What Happened, Miss Simone?
“I’ve noticed, since I did my own personal trilogy (of albums), there is a lot more room inside of me for my mother’s music and I find myself excited about performing it,” she says. “I don’t feel the same urgency to voice my own truth … so that has really allowed me to embrace my mother’s legacy.
“I can embrace being the keeper of the flame and shine a light upon it and celebrate it in a way that I guess I never thought was possible because, initially, when I told her that I wanted to start singing, my mum tried to talk me out of it. She was worried about what people would expect of me, as her daughter. She was worried they’d expect me to play piano and I don’t play piano.
“She was like, ‘But they’re gonna expect you to sing protest songs’, and now I feel like I can get up there and say, ‘Well, okay, mum, you know what? I am going to perform your songs’. And now I find myself getting ready to sing Mississippi Goddam and I’ve never sung it in public before because I never wanted to!
“But you Australian audiences asked me to (sing Mississippi Goddam) after my last time there, and now I will, because it’s a part of me. It’s part of my history and so I proudly sing my mother’s songs, but I hope people won’t forget who I am and what I bring to the table as the daughter of Nina, as the woman who is now singing her songs and stands on her shoulders and shines and carries on this beautiful legacy.”
A Daughter’s Tribute to Nina Simone plays QPAC, Brisbane, on July 23; and Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, on July 26.
qpac.com.au/whats-on/2025/lisa-simone
adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/venue-hire/theatres/her-majestys-theatre