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“They Came Out with Bach's Technique, But They Were My Songs”: Listening to Stylistic Hybridity in Nina Simone's “Love Me Or Leave Me”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2025

Michèle Duguay Open the ORCID record for Michèle Duguay [Opens in a new window]
Michèle Duguay*
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
*
Email: mduguay@fas.harvard.edu
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Abstract

In the early 2000s, a video of Nina Simone's 1960 performance of “Love Me Or Leave Me” on The Ed Sullivan Show resurfaced online. The song's original piano solo, rife with references to the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach, clearly displays Simone's training as a classical pianist. Several inaccurate claims on the solo circulate in scholarship, magazines, and social media—some describe the solo as a fugue; others incorrectly attribute it to Bach himself. This article unpacks the racial and gendered implications of the Ed Sullivan clip's reception. The misreadings of Simone's performance, I argue, are rooted in a possessive investment in whiteness and classical music. By exaggerating Bach's influence on Simone, various media erase her musical agency to advance a romanticized view of classical music as a universal art form. These narratives obscure the way her stylistic heterogeneity emerged as a response to the racial and gendered structures that shaped her performing career. Through an analysis of Simone's four renditions of “Love Me Or Leave Me,” I demonstrate how she strategically inserts textural, melodic, and harmonic allusions to Bachian counterpoint within the structure of the song. Her performances therefore showcase a form of stylistic hybridity in which she draws on her classical piano training to synthesize the conventions of fugue and popular song. By challenging narratives that incorrectly label Simone's solos as quotations or imitations rather than original compositions, I draw attention to the inner workings of her stylistic heterogeneity at the piano.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , November 2024 , pp. 331 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Music

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