In 1965 Nina Simone recorded a song that names four Black women, Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing and Peaches, and gives each one a verse.
When it came out on Wild Is the Wind in 1966, some radio stations refused to play it. In 2017 the producer No I.D. built Jay-Z’s “The Story of O.J.” around it.
Who were the “Four Women”?
Simone recorded “Four Women” in 1965, and it appeared the following year on her album Wild Is the Wind.
The structure is strikingly simple. Four verses introduce four Black women whose lives reflect different consequences of racism, slavery, colourism, sexual exploitation and the stereotypes imposed on Black women.
Aunt Sarah is dark-skinned and physically strong, accustomed to carrying pain.
Saffronia is light-skinned, born to a wealthy white father and a Black mother, her story pointing directly towards the sexual violence embedded in slavery.
Sweet Thing survives through sexuality and the value others place on her body.
Then comes Peaches, who is angry.
Simone gradually increases the tension until the final character almost explodes from the recording. Peaches gives her name in a shout, and the song ends.
Why was “Four Women” banned?
Several radio stations refused to play “Four Women,” including stations serving Black audiences. The controversy centred on the very stereotypes Simone was trying to expose.
For some listeners, Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing and Peaches looked too much like familiar racist caricatures. Rather than hearing a critique of those images, critics worried that Simone was reproducing them.
Simone’s point was precisely that these images existed — and that pretending otherwise did nothing to erase the history that had produced them. She was putting four uncomfortable representations beside one another and forcing the listener to consider where they came from.
Writer Thulani Davis later described “Four Women” in The Village Voice as “an instantly accessible analysis of the damning legacy of slavery.”
The controversy also came at a moment when Simone’s music was becoming increasingly inseparable from the Civil Rights Movement.
Only a few years earlier she had recorded “Mississippi Goddam,” written after the murder of Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church bombing that killed four Black girls. “Four Women” approached race differently. There was no explicit political slogan. Instead, Simone compressed generations of history into four characters.
The song that refused to disappear
“Four Women” was not a chart hit, but Simone kept singing it.
Simone continued performing it, and other musicians gradually began interpreting it themselves. The song eventually entered the repertoire of artists including Meshell Ndegeocello and Ledisi, while Jamaican singer Queen Ifrica transformed it through reggae.
Each version changed the musical setting, but the structure Simone had created remained powerful: four names, four lives and four different manifestations of the same history.
Then, in 2017, the song entered an entirely different musical world.
Jay-Z heard something in Nina Simone
Jay-Z’s 4:44 arrived in June 2017.
One of its most talked-about tracks was “The Story of O.J.,” produced by No I.D.
At the centre of the recording is Nina Simone.
No I.D. sampled “Four Women,” manipulating Simone’s voice and building much of the track’s musical identity around fragments of the 1966 recording.
“The Story of O.J.” deals with race, money, status and the limits of wealth as an escape from racial identity in America. More than fifty years earlier, “Four Women” had approached another side of the same historical inheritance through skin colour, class, sexuality and stereotypes.
It brought Simone’s characters into a song about what race means generations later.
From rejected radio record to a Jay-Z album
In 1966, some broadcasters considered “Four Women” too problematic to put on the radio.
In 2017, one of the biggest rappers in the world released a track constructed around Simone’s voice.
Nina Simone never heard it. She had died in 2003, fourteen years before 4:44 appeared.
Simone recorded “Four Women” in 1965, some stations refused to play it, and in 2017 her voice ran through a Jay-Z track. For more, read how Nina Simone played to 50,000 people in Harlem and visit our Nina Simone page.
Which version of “Four Women” do you know best?
