The little-known friendship between Nina Simone and Langston Hughes
By Adria R Walker
A new book charts how a 1949 meeting between the renowned poet and the legendary musician, then a 16-year-old girl, sparked enduring ties and fruitful collaboration
In 1949, the poet and writer Langston Hughes was already a towering figure – he toured the country reading his poems and lecturing, drawing crowds that filled auditoriums. That year, at a lecture in Asheville, North Carolina, Hughes met a 16-year-old girl, Eunice Waymon, who would go on to make history in her own right using her stage name, Nina Simone.
Hughes and Simone became friends and collaborators, working together on songs such as Backlash Blues, which soundtracked what was then a nascent Black Power movement. The song influenced Kwame Ture, the activist and Black revolutionary who was then known as Stokely Carmichael, who popularized the phrase “Black power”.
“Nina Simone refined the strategies of resistance Langston Hughespioneered during the Harlem Renaissance to create the soundtrack to the civil rights movement and inaugurate the birth of Black Power,” writes W Jason Miller, author of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power, a new book that explores the previously underacknowledged relationship between Hughes and Simone.
