When four black children were killed in the bombing of a church in Birmingham in 1963, Nina wrote Mississippi Goddam, a bitter and furious accusation of the situation of her people in the USA. The strong emotional approach of this song and the others on her first Philips record ("Nina Simone In Concert"), would become another characteristic in her art. She uses her voice with its remarkable timbre and her careful piano playing as means to achieve her artistic aim: to express love, hate, sorrow, joy, loneliness - the whole range of human emotions - through music, in a direct way.

One moment, she is the actress who turns a Kurt Weill-Bertold Brecht song as Pirate Jenny into great theater, then, after a set of protest songs, she will sing Jacques Brel's fragile love song Ne Me Quitte Pas in French.

Although Nina was called "High Priestess of Soul" and was respected by fans and critics as a mysterious, almost religious figure, she was often misunderstood as well. When she wrote Four Women in 1966, a bitter lament of four black women whose circumstances and outlook are related to subtle gradations in skin color, the song was banned on Philadelphia and new York radio stations because "it was insulting to black people..."

The High Priestess would walk different paths to find the adequate music to spread her message. Her first RCA album, "Nina Simone Sings The Blues", includes her own I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl, Do I Move You, a haunting version of My Man's Gone Now (again from "Porgy & Bess") and the protest song Backlash Blues, based on a poem written for her by Langston Hughes.
Her repertoire includes more Civil Rights songs: Why? The King of Love is Dead, capturing the tragedy of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Brown Baby, Images (based on a Waring Cuney poem), Go Limp, Old Jim Crow, ... One song, To be Young, Gifted and Black, inspired by Lorraine Hansberry's play with the same title, became the black national anthem in the USA....

And Salon profiled her in 2000:

Her 1968 album, "'Nuff Said," contained tracks as various as "Ain't Got No/I Got Life," a medley from the '60s musical "Hair," the spiritual "Take My Hand Precious Lord" and her own "Backlash Blues," taken from the poetry of Langston Hughes.

The next year the album "To Love Somebody" was released with the title song by Barry and Robin Gibb. It made the British Top 10. The album had three Bob Dylan covers including "I Shall Be Released," as well as songs by Leonard Cohen and Pete Seeger, along with "Revolution," a protest song co-written by Simone and Weldon Irvine Jr. "To Love Somebody" was my introduction to Simone, and I'll never forget the way she berated her musicians during the intro to "Revolution." She harshly tells them, "Hold it! This is louder than usual. Let it groove on its own thing." Cool. I thought. This woman can kick butt ...

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