In Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone (Pantheon), biographer Nadine Cohodas details her subject’s life from its precarious lower middle class origins in North Carolina through her expatriate years in France and death in 2003. Exhaustingly researched through interviews and contemporary press accounts of her idiosyncratic career, Princess Noire follows the singer through a life filled with extraordinary associates (Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin), political militancy, angry tantrums and erratic behavior. By 1970 she was judged as a difficult woman by the music business; even if she had tried to play the game, it’s likely that her increasingly eclectic music would have gotten lost in a marketplace segregated into easily identifiable bins.
If Princess Noire has a fault, it’s a problem endemic nowadays to writers of weighty biographies. Cohodas chronicles the growth of each tree in Simone’s life with such attention that she loses sight of the forest. But as a compendium of the facts of a fascinating if flawed artist, Princess Noire will be hard to top.
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