The song has been covered countless times since its release, though Simone’s version remains unsurpassed. It is a case of less is more - beautifully sparse with a simple high-hat and a foot stomp to showcase the most stirring of voices. The album opens with the astonishing "Be my Husband", the writing credits of which were attributed to then husband and manager Andrew Stroud. If you believe great albums should have some sort of overall narrative then you might be disappointed. Pastel Blues came a few years later, presenting a group of songs that on the surface seem to share nothing more in common than they occupy the same piece of vinyl. Tucked away on that recording was a song called "My Baby Just Cares for Me", which went on to become one of the most recognisable recordings in popular music history. Simone sold the rights to her first album for just $3000. She thus had to fund her classical lessons by playing 'the devils music' in and around the clubs of New York and Atlantic City. Simone was famously refused entry to the prestigious Curtis Institute because she was black. Raised on blues and southern gospel, it was said that people would come to church just to hear Simone play. Simone’s is a vocal and musical talent like no other, and Pastel Blues captures her at the height of her powers. But when it comes to Nina Simone, it's a descriptor that really does fit. Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.The word 'legend' is used far to casually at the best of times. The cantankerous characteristics of Dr Simone are perhaps best defined in a story that comes courtesy of the quasi-concert film 20,000 Days on Earth during which Nick Cave and Warren Ellis describe having booked Simone for a concert at a time when she was ill, ailing and as snappy as a crocodile card game. Watch a New Nina Simone Animation Based on an Interview Never Aired in the U.S. Nina Simone Sings Her Breakthrough Song, ‘I Loves You Porgy,’ in 1962 The song itself hints broadly at the pain of her own childhood, and that of so many others, then concludes with pride, hope, and affirmation. She “did not so much interpret songs,” writes Adam Shatz in the New York Review of Books, “as take possession of them.” But her most famous remains her own composition, “Mississippi Goddam,” a passionate response to the murder of Medgar Evers, the Sixteenth Street Church bombing in Birmingham, and other shocking acts of brutality by members of the White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as the retaliatory police violence and mass arrests at Tennessee sit-ins.Īfter her first performance of the song at a 1964 Carnegie Hall concert (during which she shouted at the shocked audience, “You’re all gonna die!”), it would become “a civil rights anthem.” The performance itself was a sly bait-and-switch “determined to bring a taste of the era’s injustice to her mostly white audience,” Simone introduced the song as a “show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.” And indeed it sounds like one, “at least for a few moments.” The song, writes Shatz, “represented a revolution in black political oratory.”Īnd yet, writes Claudia Roth Pierpont in The New Yorker, she “had been hesitant at first.” It was playwright Lorraine Hansberry who pushed her into speaking, though she “only started a process that events in American quickly accelerated.” After the Birmingham bombing, Simone recalled wanting to “go out and kill someone… I could identify as being in the way of my people.” Instead she took her outrage to the stage, and she memorialized Hansberry after her friend’s death at age 34 with a song she called “the Black national anthem,” also the title of Hansberry’s posthumous autobiography, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” Before the performance above, at a Morehouse College recording session in 1969, Simone emotionally describes the genesis of the song in an interview. After her ambitions as a concert pianist were frustrated, Simone rose to fame as a brilliantly talented performer of classical, jazz, folk, blues, and cabaret music.