Over the course of her almost fifty year performing career, Nina Simone was a lot of things to a lot of different people. She was the husky-voiced, primitive blues goddess of "See Line Woman" and "Feeling Good," the fearless Civil Rights crusader of "Old Jim Crow" and "Mississippi Goddam," the sophisticated "High Priestess of Soul" who gave her definitive 1966 album its name. She was, of course, all of these things; more often than not, she was all of them at the same time. And that is precisely why the essence of Simone is so difficult to capture on a single disc. To try and boil down a career as long, as varied, as singularly eclectic as hers into just a handful of iconic moments is an exercise in futility.
Thankfully, the compilers of these reissues understand that fact. Playing to just three of Simone's many strengths, they wisely highlight each with a disc of its own: Sings the Blues and Silk & Soul, both originally released in 1967, cover their self-explanatory genres with the comfortable ease of a woman who has been blending them for years, while Forever Young, Gifted & Black compiles politically-minded highlights and rarities from the late '60s. Granted, some might argue that these releases are inherently flawed, hailing as they do from the singer's late '60s tenure at RCA rather than her two trailblazing "classic years" with Phillips. But if listening to this music with fresh ears proves anything, it's that there's a timelessness to all of Simone's work, which no amount of critical grumpiness could ever erase.
As a matter of fact, these albums work a hell of a lot better than they have any right to. Forever Young, Gifted & Black's track listing reads at first glance like a senseless grab bag of Civil Rights Nina: a single here, an alternate take there, a smattering of live cuts to fill the gaps. But the music within is never less than interesting, and often revelatory. Three excerpts from Simone's performance at the Westbury Music Fair on April 7, 1968, mere days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, are the obvious highlights: a performance so charged that the stage banter by a shell-shocked, emotional Simone rivals the music for intensity. "Do you realize how many we have lost?" she asks before the rousing final chorus of "Why? (The King of Love is Dead)," a long-edited tribute to Dr. King here expanded to its full thirteen minutes. "They're shooting us down one by one." Next, she invokes the Birmingham Four and launches into an incendiary rendition of "Mississippi Goddam" which threatens to leave its better-known counterpart (from 1964's Nina Simone in Concert) in the dust. "The King of Love is dead! I ain't 'bout to be non-violent, honey!" she exclaims before the final verse, demonstrating in just thirteen words the miles of difference four years can make in the national consciousness.
Article comments
1 - robert lashley
Thank you for an insightful and knowledgable review of such a great artist.
2 - Zach
Thanks - glad you liked it!