Simone ’ s conversation was itself a form of music , conducted in major and minor modes , sometimes fortissimo , sometimes dangerously piano ; one learned to draw back when she started to speak quietly ; it was usually only the build-up to an explosion . She lived and died before celebrity voices were called on to voice animated characters in the movies . She would , doubtless , have been infuriated by the suggestion , but had she been so persuaded one can imagine her inhabiting such parts with profound conviction . Though , like most girls of her class and colour , she had learned to sing in church , she had been happy to sing low , not so much a natural contralto as a girl who didn ’ t want to soar above the congregation the way some girls could and did . Some of the greatest singers in popular music – Billie Holiday is only the most obvious example , but Bob Marley and Bob Dylan , too – have very little vocal range . Nina would have known from her studies that every singer has a tessitura , the range within which the voice possesses its natural “ texture ”. Volume has a part to play in this , too . A low voice with no projection would be no more than a muffled murmur into the piano soundbox . But Nina Simone , while no soprano virtuoso , had unmistakable vocal power . She could project , and with the first lineaments of the dramatic throb that was to become her trademark .
Whether at the end of that summer , Eunice regarded her time at the Midtown Bar & Grill as just a bizarre episode – many of us have had summer jobs that in long retrospect seem utterly improbable and remote – or whether she had begun to intuit that this , rather than the concert hall was to be her working environment , it is hard to tell . She continued to insist that her emerging career as a club singer was only ever considered as a holding operation , something she was required to do until the
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