Pirate Nina

“This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.” -Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddamn” 

A great aside from a great song, but maybe the show had been written already? I ask this question because the same album that has Simone’s definitive reading of THAT song, the song that both broke her carrier, and, possibly, broke her as a person (the person that could no longer be a simple “entertainer’ but couldn’t find a place in a racist society that wanted her to simply be an “entertainer”) comes a couple of songs after a show tune that HAD been written for a show, even if that show was, in reality, a piece of agitprop political theater written in Weimar Germany in the late 1920s. “Pirate Jenny” comes from the Threepenny Opera, and Simone’s version of it is THE version of the song. It is the version I show my intro to German Studies class every time I teach Brecht’s play. I show it to them not because it gives them insight into the culture of Brecht’s time, but because it, more than Lotte Lenya’s original version of the song, proves Brecht right: epic theater isn’t meant to embalm a time or place for the reader or viewer, nor is it simply meant to lull the spectator into a somnambulism of entertainment,  but is meant to mobilize the viewer into something that looks like political reflection and action. 

My students have no experience of the working class in Germany during the 1920s. To them it might as well be as relevant as the plebs of the Roman empire, the slaves of Egypt or the beggars of John Gay’s opera. But Nina Simone, though few of my students are aware of her and her music (that just might be rectified by the recent Netflix documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?”), performs something in that song that we as Americans live in the way we live with air and water: the long history of racism and slavery. Simone transports the titular character of the song from an imagined German port town to South Carolina, where the figure of a pirate queen among the citizens seems more implausible than a pirate queen among the German sea merchants. The original Pirate Jenny seemed a fanciful character—and Brecht, ever the dialectician, can’t decide whether Pirate Jenny’s revenge is either liberation or the worst form of false consciousness. Someday I’ll show them who’s boss! I’ll have my revenge on these men who take me for granted! This is what the exploited worker says every day of her life. Equally applicable to Marx as to Trump. The song, in the original play, is a story that Polly, the love interest of Macheath and daughter to the beggar king Peachum, relates to Mac’s band of criminals on her wedding night. The whole wedding night is played as farce: a bourgeois wedding in the middle of a horse stable. Polly insists on having her chaiselongue like any respectable woman of society, even as her husband is being hunted for pimping and murder. 

Outside of the play’s context, Simone’s performance is simply related as the story of Pirate Jenny. Many years after the original recording, Simone will introduce the song thus: “this is the story of Jenny in a flop house in Germany. We have transported Jenny to a flop house in South Carolina. And Jenny has decided to kill everybody this night. Everybody who has come to that flop house and then she is going home.” The context couldn’t be more different: in Brecht’s original Jenny’s story is related through the character of Polly as a kind of pantomime: the audience never believes that Jenny is really a pirate queen intent on getting her revenge on the men who have exploited her labor at the flop house. Simone doesn’t care about the context. Hell, she doesn’t really give a fuck whether or not Jenny IS a pirate queen. The most important point is that Jenny will kill everyone this night. Pirate queen or not. And it is in this re-interpretation of the song that reveals something Brecht was afraid to make manifest through his multiple layers of storytelling and distancing: the distance between a flop house in Germany and South Carolina is the difference (or is it the final, dialectical conflagration) of race and class. By the time Simone sings the song at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 1992 the bitterness of years spent in exile suffering from fatigue has warn the voice and the message: Simone perhaps has already come to embody the Jenny figure: the last pirate queen standing, threatening the white patrons of the flop house with a death sentence that will never come. 

But, goddamn indeed, what can the listener make of the younger Simone singing this song in 1964 after the marches and church bombings? She’s about to introduce “Mississippi Goddamn” a few songs later. As so many have pointed out, only a woman could get away with such radically political songs sung openly in public. And so, when Simone whispers in Pirate Jenny “kill them now, or later?” its not the wishful thinking of some barmaid in Germany but the first insurrection of an artist who, a mere few years later, will ask an audience in Harlem “are you ready to kill if necessary? Is your mind ready? Is your body ready? […] are you ready to smash white things? Burn buildings if necessary?”

What happens to artists who dare to ask such violent questions in public? It’s no coincidence that both Brecht and Simone ended up in exile, although Brecht would be given the option of Hollywood and, eventually, be given his own theater in East Germany—where the speaking  of such violent truths became the founding myth of the state itself. Of course, by the time those truths had been codified into state sanctioned myths, they obfuscated other violent acts that couldn’t be spoken. And to the material conditions that enabled THOSE myths, Brecht remained silent. This isn’t to condemn Brecht, no one knows what sort of comforts would have awaited even Pirate Jenny had she been allowed to return home. But Simone never enjoyed Brecht’s status as a state sanctioned artist: she played jazz festivals to well ensconced audiences who were either too reverential or bored to care for such ugly truths. But, regardless of where Simone allowed Pirate Jenny to tell her tale of revenge and (mass) murder, when she translates Jenny’s rather sarcastic “whoops” at the end with the southern black woman’s “that’ll learn ya!”, anyone listening can rest assured that they’ve been properly schooled.