The blues according to Nina Simone: my ode to Queen Nina

What hasn’t been said or written about Queen Nina Simone? She has been called an icon, a legend, and a genius, and she is one of my favorite artists of all time and I would be remiss if I didn’t use my blogging platform to honor her music – especially her love of blues and her strong political stance. She passed away in April of 2003 and she has haunted me since. My late father told me a story of being about 16 years old in Hollywood. This would have been in the early/mid 60s. Nina Simone was playing at a club and he snuck in to see her. He met her for a few seconds and she told him how adorable he was. He used to listen to her version “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” over and over, which the Animals covered a few years later. After my pops passed, I would listen to that song over and over too. It was soothing to my soul. She was incomparable and a complete bad-ass in everything she did.

Here are some of my favorite Nina tracks, starting with the aforementioned:

“Do I Move You?”

Here is Nina’s song, written by her contemporary, Langston Hughes:

“Mississippi Goddamn” was written by Nina in response “to the June 12, 1963, murder of Medgar Evers and the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black girls and partly blinded a fifth. She said that the song was ‘like throwing ten bullets back at them,’ becoming one of many other protest songs written by Simone. The song was released as a single, and it was boycotted in some southern states. Promotional copies were smashed by a Carolina radio station and returned to Philips. She later recalled how Mississippi Goddam was her ‘first civil rights song’ and that the song came to her ‘in a rush of fury, hatred and determination'(Wikipedia).”

One of her most ebullient & widely covered songs: