Nina Simone

Nina Simone refused to be put in a box, and the refusal was the point. She moved between jazz, classical, blues, gospel, folk, and pop, often within a single performance, bound together by a deep, grainy voice and a commanding piano technique. She called what she did “Black classical music” and dared anyone to argue.

She’d trained as a classical pianist and dreamed of being the first Black concert pianist in America, a door that racism slammed shut – a wound she carried for life. She turned to nightclubs to make a living and discovered she could sing, and the classical rigor never left her playing. You can hear Bach in the way she builds a vamp.

In the 1960s she became one of the most powerful musical voices of the civil rights movement. “Mississippi Goddam,” written in fury after the Birmingham church bombing, and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” were anthems, unflinching and direct. She put her career at risk to sing the truth, and meant every word.

Her life was turbulent – illness, exile, hardship, a temperament as fierce as her talent – and she spent her later years largely abroad, embittered by an America that never fully gave her her due. But the recordings are commanding, singular, impossible to mistake for anyone else. There was only ever one Nina Simone.