A Tale of the Black Freighter

"Pirate Jenny" is, like a vast array of other oft-covered songs ("Mack the Knife," "September Song," and "Alabama Song," among others), the work of German composer/songwriter Kurt Weill. And, like "Mack the Knife," it was written for his collaboration with postmodern playwright Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper)-- the barmaid Polly Peachum (no one knows why Polly- rather than the actual Jenny herself) is asked by the crew of thieves and thugs at her wedding reception to sing them a song, so she delivers a merry tune about murdering them all and razing the town.

Pretty standard stuff for Brecht, honestly, and only slightly darker than the usual Weill fare.

What many, many people miss in their versions of "Pirate Jenny," as with a great deal of Weill's work (God bless you Bobby Darin, but Macheath is supposed to be a figure of irredeemible evil), is the seething emotional intensity that's supposed to be in it. Polly is a trod-upon figure: the daughter of a beggar-king, married in a stable to a murderer and rapist, competing romantically with a whore. Couple that with Brecht's hardcore communism and the fact that the "Beggar's Opera" is a seething attack on the crimes of all classes, and you can picture the boiling resentment that finally comes to a head in Polly's only solo song in the play.

This is where Nina Simone, one of the greatest female black singers in history (and I would say the greatest, except that Billy has such incredible inertia behind her reputation), comes in with fists swinging. After all, it's not as though Bobby Darin knew oppression or poverty firsthand. But "Pirate Jenny" seems to be a song tailor-made for, if not civil rights, then at least the angry masses. And whereas Brecht's original lyrics were written to resonate with the German underclass (which, in 1928, was pretty angry without his help), Simone makes no bones as to whom she speaks: there are only two major changes her version makes from the most common English translation (please, anyone but Blitzstein, Blitzstein who translated "Pimp's Ballad" as "Memories Tango").

One is from "and you'll see me dressed in tatters in this ratty old hotel"to "in this crummy Southern town in this crummy old hotel," which does a huge amount to cement Simone's version as being sung, if not by her, then by someone of her background. The other, while more subtle, packs an even stronger punch. Whereas the original German is simply "There's a ship in the harbor," Simone changes it to "there's a ship: the black freighter," bellowing out the line with what is quite possibly the voice of God; if you don't get a little shiver, then I as your friend take it as a responsibility to save you from the shambolic state of undeath you must be in. Sung by a black woman, in 1964, on the same album that included "Mississippi Goddam" there is little room for imagination as to what the freighter represents to Simone's narrator: we will come, we will destroy those who held us down, and I will be our queen.

It's not all power politics in Simone's version though. Besides all that murderin' and pillagin,' there's a really strong sexual element that gets missed (although the '97 Donmar Warehouse recording of the play nails that hard, nails it like the play was Mack and the sexual element was any woman with a pulse). Simone taps into the sadism and the urge for power that is such a huge part of Polly's character. In the second-to-last verse, Simone trades her brimstone bellow for a nearly-orgasmic moan, following up her pleading, whimpering in the quiet of death with the incredibly tense, gasping right. now. To play the song straight would be ludicrous-- it's Brecht, the man who defined his style around "the distancing effect"--and Simone taps into its inherent cruelty, viciousness, and the power fantasy contained within it. It's nuanced, it's absolutely chilling, and it's one of Simone's absolute best performances. Just listen to it.



(The art at left certainly isn't conicidental-- Alan Moore admits that the Black Freighter story thread in Watchmen was inspired by Weill and Brecht's song, especially Simone's version).