The little-known friendship between Nina Simone and Langston Hughes

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 poem

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”. Continue reading...