Westwind

Hello everyone, I hope your research projects and presentations are all coming along nicely. I have deeply enjoyed these blogs because I like to dig into Nina Simone’s music a lot, which I think has been super valuable to forming an argument for her work. Finding the less popular songs of hers that are equally as valuable and important to her artistic creativity give me way more joy than listening to songs such as “I Put a Spell on You” because this is her true artistry and what she worked for. They are like Easter eggs to the ear for me. 

With that said, this week I want to talk about the song “Westwind” by Nina Simone. This song was from the 1969 album “Black Gold”, which also featured the song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”, which is a song that I have written about before for a previous post and we have all read in our textbooks. This song was written by the South African artist Caiphus Semenya and when performed by Simone, she claims she was told to sing it because of Miriam Mekeba. Miriam Mekeba was another prominent South African musician and civil rights activist. She was an advocate against apartheid and was also married to Stokely Carmichael. Simone begins the song by acknowledging that it is “a good time to introduce the heartbeat of our organization, the pulse of everything we do”. 

Anyways, this song has a very clear message, which is “unify us, don’t divide us”. The majority of this song is focused on natural and dark imagery, as it talks about the sun being “brown and over” and black clouds. Eventually it goes on to mention gallons of water and say “I am the soil from which they came,” following the theme of darker things within nature. Then, later in the song it shifts to something interesting towards the end of the song, which is “Westwind with your splendor/ Take my people by the hand/ Spread your glory sunshine off/ And unify my promised land”. This seems important because this is when we really get the emphasis on the theme that continues on of unification of the promised land. This is what brings me back to obvious arguments of the time about either integration or separation within the black community in America. This obviously was echoing over in Africa, so channeling that into something that can then hold weight in America is important, and Nina Simone captures that with her introduction to the song when she performs it live.