Nina Simone, one of the most arresting voices in 20th century music, is one of those people who are just impossible to capture in one dimension. That’s why scholar and poet Shonda Buchanan created a new approach for her book, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone. Buchanan, an Assistant Professor of English at Western Michigan University, joined Stateside to discuss how she blended poetry, memoir, and historical reflection in her pursuit of the internal spirit of Nina Simone.
In The Lost Songs, Buchanan uses poetry to tell the chronology of Simone’s life, starting with the singer’s ancestors and her childhood in North Carolina, and moving through Simone’s music career and her self-imposed exile to Liberia and Europe.
“I was always thinking about where she stood,” Buchanan said, describing her writing process. “The feet on the soil. And then from where she stood, where she was born, where she dropped, where her ancestors dropped. How do you make the music of that? How do you make the poetry of that landscape?”…