By Johnny Ray Huston

'I KNOW ABOUT God," Nina Simone says, "but I don't believe in any denomination."

"I think it's necessary, and I know that ritual is necessary," she continues, picking up speed. "If I need the solitude – and I often do – and the meditation and the questions and communication with God, I'll go to any church. But I won't get involved with it to the point it dominates my thinking. Music is my god."

The above quote comes from an interview segment at the beginning of Nina Simone: Live at Ronnie Scott's, a 1984 London concert recently issued on DVD. It leads into footage of the late Simone singing and playing "God God God," a performance that could teach Nico a lesson in terms of finessing the recurrent notes and tonalities of a dirge. Her left hand keeps rhythm, her right hand solos, and her eyes stare straight ahead. The sound is naked and minimalist; the meditative quality of her voice shifts to frustration and striving resolve as the piano sound grows more forceful and ascends a staircase of wakefulness.

"God God God" drifts near-aimlessly along a somnolent journey, then snaps to attention and grasps at a revelation just out of reach in a manner that only a Simone song can. Yet even if music was Simone's god, the onward-and-upward questing that characterized her songwriting and performances extended from her life – this daughter of a Southern methodist minister abandoned a "home" country that had subjected her to racial discrimination and governmental persecution, which were often interchangeable. She romanced a prime minister in Barbados and a major business leader in Liberia before settling, as fitfully as one can settle, in France. Within the song, Simone refers to "God God God" 's title mantra as her "silent war cry." But she was rarely silent in life.

Break Down and Let It All Out, Sylvia Hampton's new Simone biography (written with her brother, music journalist David Nathan), captures more than a few war cries, many directed at those close to Simone. Like Simone's autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, Hampton's portrait takes its name from a signature song, but the similarities basically stop there. The bipolar opposite of Etta James's outrageously candid Rage to Survive and a stern cousin of Billie Holiday's mythmaking Lady Sings the Blues, Simone's self-account aims to maintain an air of mystery, leaping eras to downplay behavior that doesn't fit her deserved reputation as a righteous civil rights icon; the result is a strange work that comes to an abrupt close shortly after a suicide attempt is casually dismissed. Break Down focuses precisely on the volatile behavior Simone refused to disclose. A foreword by Simone's daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, sets the mood, reminiscing on "her smell, her touch, her smile (when it was real) and her passion."

That parenthetical stands out. It's the stuff of mother-daughter melodrama. But neither Break Down's foreword nor the book that follows qualifies as a Christina Crawford vendetta – even if Simone, like it or not, became a surrogate mother of sorts to Hampton. A fan club secretary, Hampton could be counted upon for unreasonable devotion. Simone imaginatively tested the limits of this quality, until one 3:15 a.m. phone call – angrily demanding that Hampton show up immediately at her hotel room – caused it to snap. For years the Love Sorceress and High Priestess of Soul and her most faithful worshiper remained out of touch. Shortly thereafter, when Nathan refused to travel on a whim to Morocco with Simone in order to help her write her life story, she proceeded to write him and Hampton out of it.

Simone's Live at Ronnie Scott's dates from a time close to Break Down's chief showdown and serves as another window into her state of mind at the time. One of her greatest compositions takes the Lord's name in vain, and her varying performances of the song honestly reflect her moods of the moment: on the famous 1964 recording Nina Simone Live at Town Hall, "Mississippi Goddam" is forceful, even comedic in its defiance. Twenty years later and one ocean away at Ronnie Scott's, Simone races through it somewhat distractedly, adding the name "Reagan" to its list of everybody-knows-about woes, impatient not so much with the song as with its continued relevance. The tune she throws the full force of her talent behind is the romantic lament "For a While," a bit of treacle she turns into gold – after dedicating it to an absent lover.

If music is Simone's god, then listening to her music (and that of Jimmy Scott and others) might be as close as I've come to worship. The couple of times I saw Simone in concert, late in her life, the eccentricities that Break Down renders in compassionate, sometimes hilarious detail had moved to the foreground of her onstage presence. She raised a scepter to demand standing ovations, which audiences were more than willing to provide. Working with a full band (as opposed to Live at Ronnie Scott's two-piece) sometimes muddied her approach, and her near-aimless drifts didn't always find their way back to a song's end. Yet just when one might begin to worry, Simone would throw a lightning bolt. Langston Hughes's "Images" silenced the concert hall.

Wild is the wind, wild was her mind, and Break Down contains more than a few colorful anecdotes about Simone's quirks. Relying on the suspect practice of relating decades-old conversations verbatim as if she'd taped them, Hampton studiously re-creates Simone's tendency to pepper remarks with a sharp "Ha!" and favorite expressions such as "man" and "daaarling." While disdainful of the media's tendency to emphasize Simone's problems, Break Down hardly shies away from relating painful stories about the mental instability of the woman behind the music. And yet the ones that linger are funny: "Dr. Nina Simone" having her arrival announced at the bank and sparring with restaurant owners. A naked-beneath-a-fur-coat Simone commanding a bashful Nathan to share her belief that she was the reincarnation of Nefertiti ("I was a great queen"). Who could argue with her?

Break Down's chief paradox is that while Hampton's and Nathan's white, British, and gay background proves a severe limitation in terms of relating to – and relating – Simone's experiences and her troubled mind, it also adds an ever tense poignance to their bond with her. Perhaps never fully formed, that bond was impossible to sever. "YOU MUST BELIEVE IN GOD, you MUST believe in GOD!" Simone yelled at Nathan during one of their first encounters, shortly after Blood, Sweat, and Tears' cover of "God Bless the Child" had sent her into a rage. Both he and Hampton wound up following her advice, and I'm not talking about mere diva worship.

It's easy to see why. Filtering a strong spirit through a wealth of personae that might give Chaka Khan woman envy, the ritual and the meditation and the questions and the communication are all there, in her songs.