“I Wish”)—Rada pays homage to Simone’s vocal style, and in concert, Rada’s non-Ethiopian audience responds the most enthusiastically to her Nina Simone covers. From a 2014 performance in New York’s Madison Square Park that I attended, to the Montreal jazz festival the same year,16 to Hulugeb (the annual Ethiopian-Israeli cultural festival in Jerusalem, where she introduced the song “Four Women” in Hebrew), her Nina Simone covers draw as much attention as her original compositions. As an audience member in New York, London, and Jerusalem, I have found that “Four Women” is the Nina Simone cover that consistently sparks the most dramatic audience reaction, performed in a style alternating between soul-jazz and Ethio-soul. She introduces the song to her audience as representing the African American female experience, and her arrangement of the song implies that Afrodiasporic narratives of violence inscribed on the body inform the way that Ethiopian-Israelis can relate to their host society.
Nina Simone first recorded “Four Women” in 1966, performing it widely in France shortly after she composed it (Audio file 1). The lyrics introduce a set of first-person African American narratives through the gendered language of sexual violence, establishing a fictive kinship with black women everywhere. In each verse Simone sings from the perspective of a different woman, describing in few words a set of obstacles for African Americans from the era of slavery to the civil rights struggle of the 1960s (for analysis of the song’s lyrics, see Feldstein 2013: 108–109). Like much of Simone’s repertoire, the song has come under scrutiny from critics, torn between interpreting it as allegory or as stereotype. African American studies scholar Ruth Feldstein interprets the song as a set of paradigms of black women’s experience in America (ibid.: 111). First, Aunt Sarah is dark-skinned and her “back is strong,” indicating that she is a slave (and, presumably, forcibly converted to Christianity). As the first of the story’s matriarchs (like the biblical Sarah), her gentle voice represents her as a mammy figure, the maternal and comforting housemaid of the plantation. Next, Saffronia is biracial or “yellow,” the result of the rape of a black woman by a “rich and white” man. Her clearly enunciated diction, along with the violence implied by her skin color, evokes the pressures on black women in a Jim Crow postemancipation America that was still explicitly racist. Then comes the “tan” Sweet Thing, available to “anyone who has money to buy.” In a lineage of black women exploited by men, her life in the sex trade was typical of many African American singers before the civil rights era (see Feldstein 2013, Maultsby 2006). Finally, the “brown” Peaches is “awfully bitter.” In both versions, Nina Simone and Ester Rada sing this part in a raspy voice punctuated by crescendo and emotion. The characters’ personal obstacles are indexed by their phenotype, skin color, and hair texture, revealing a history of violence against black female bodies, from slavery to rape to forced prostitution (see Burnim and Maultsby 2006).
Analysis of the song often focuses on the narrative structure and the biographical paradigms of the four women, but less attention is devoted to the musical structure, in which Simone articulates the tension in the lives of black women in America equally poignantly. It is worth spending a moment on Simone’s aesthetic choices, because Rada’s version is substantially different. Both communicate tension through syncopation, and examination of Simone’s musical structure—especially her blurring of duple and triple meter—illuminates Rada’s arrangement of the song (Audio file 2). By comparing the two versions, we see that Rada creates musical tension through a hemiola effect (the pitting of duple pulse against triple pulse), while Simone uses additive meter, with a tresillolike 3+3+2 pulse, but that one might prefer to follow as a syncopated 4/4. Simone’s voice and lyrics communicate the tension, too, but the song’s subtle metrical structure expresses struggle and opposition through an ongoing conflict between duple and triple meter within and across the bar lines.
The bass instrument (in some versions a double bass, in others a keyboard) enhances the syncopated feel in Simone’s version, playing on one, four, and seven in the cycle of eight. This syncopation implies triple meter, which her voice enhances: she usually begins a line on the seven, pausing halfway through the line and eventually ending at the end of the next measure. Likewise, her piano solos subvert 4/4 counting: they usually begin on an upbeat, just after the bass begins the 3+3+2 pattern. The syncopated metrical structure within each measure therefore creates a polyrhythmic effect between voice, piano, and bass. This syncopation of the supple structure creates the effect of triplets when following the bass notes on one, four, and seven; of triple meter when combined with other instruments; or of polyrhythm when the bass is subdued by a flute or cello. The effect of Simone’s syncopation of her voice, the piano, and the accompanying instruments is tension and delay, matching the lyrical themes of internal struggle, political vindication, and life narrative as national allegory (see Jackson 2013).
Bolstering the dramatic tension created in the lyrics and through the syncopated meter, Simone’s voice works with the melodic instruments to gradually thicken the song’s texture and navigate the melodic contour. The first verse includes only voice, drums (playing just the second half of each measure), and a keyboard (or a double bass) playing the bass notes. Each verse adds another instrument to build counterpoint: guitar in verse 2, flute in verse 3, and a lowregister string (viola, cello) in verse 4, with Simone playing a piano solo between verses 3 and 4, and finishing the song on a dramatic staccato ascent. In concert, a hand drum often comes in during verse 3 to exoticize Sweet Thing. But most of the drama is contained in Simone’s voice, which draws from different timbres to emphasize the characteristics of each woman. In addition to increasing her ornamentation in each verse—from the minimal decoration of Aunt Sarah to a melismatic Peaches punctuated by vibrato—Simone increases her vocal range as the song progresses. Maintaining a virtually identical skeletal melody throughout, Simone sings almost in monotone for Aunt Sarah, and jumps across an octave for Peaches.
The vocal tension created by Simone’s voice is a key element of her style, and she creates that tension in “Four Women” through timbre and dynamics. From her near-whisper of Saffronia’s name in verse 2 to an abrupt transition to raspiness for Peaches in verse 4, she punctuates the song’s rhythmic structure with her own commentary on the characters. Most recognizable for Simone’s fans, though, is the song’s cadenza (see Maultsby 2006: 280), the rapid ascent at the end of verse 4 complemented by an ascending and then rapidly descending piano, an ending that she popularized with her hit song “Sinnerman.” In “Four Women” she commences this cadenza between the lines “What do they call me” and “My name is Peaches,” the piano delaying the climactic announcement of her sarcastic and decidedly anticlimactic name. The ascent with her voice, in contrast to the piano’s crescendo and cascading, descending contour, concludes the song with a contrapuntal tension that mirrors the narrative structure. Indeed, quite apart from the lyrics, the song’s melody and rhythmic structure emphasize the diversity of life stories that the lyrics express explicitly.
Ester Rada imprints her own style on “Four Women” through an Ethio-soul arrangement, reimagining the song entirely at the level of song structure and instrumental arrangement (Rada follows Simone’s melodic contour, her lyrics, and her vocal timbre). The black otherness that Rada expresses through musical vernaculars of soul and Ethio-jazz is represented in the song’s lyrics about abuse of black women, but she also plays it out in the juxtaposition of African American musical vernaculars (jazz, funk) in the verses and Ethio-jazz in the bridge. The shift from minor scales to hemitonic modes, and from syncopation to triple meter are small but significant adjustments to the instrumental accompaniment, forming the basis of Rada’s reimagining, in which Ethiopian-Israelis share the experience of blackness with African Americans.
Rada’s voice is strongly influenced by Nina Simone’s raspy timbre, low vocal register, and minimal ornamentation, but for all the similarities of vocal delivery, Rada’s version adapts the structure of “Four Women” substantially. In contrast to Simone’s syncopated 3+3+2 structure, Rada and her band delineate the verses by creating a chorus from the “My name is Aunt Sarah/ Saffronia/ Sweet Thing /Peaches” section. After an introduction with Rada singing “My skin is” on the pickup, the first measure of the verse begins on the word “black,” as it does on each subsequent verse on “yellow,” “tan,” or “brown,” the skin color of each character, with skin color explicitly forming the rhythmic and narrative delineation of the verse. Each verse lasts twelve measures, with drums and