1. I Loves You, Porgy

Few artists have thrived so spectacularly while being so disinclined towards the recording industry, but then few have been as talented as Nina Simone. The turning point in her career was a rejection from the Curtis Institute of Music in 1951, which she later came to understand was racially motivated. Nina Simone – born Eunice Kathleen Waymon – was a child prodigy, and a fund had been set up by people in her native Tryon, North Carolina to help her become the first female black concert pianist in the US. The surprise rejection left her rudderless and in need of money. After various legitimate jobs, Eunice adopted a stage name to ensure her Methodist minister mother wouldn’t find out she was playing “the devil’s music” in an Atlantic City bar (Nina was a pet name given to her by a boyfriend; Simone came from French actress Simone Signoret). After a first night of interspersing gospel songs with Bach, Czerny and Liszt at the Midtown Bar and Grill, Simone was told she’d have to sing in future if she wanted to keep her job. She quickly built up a repertoire and a steady following, leading to interest from Bethlehem Records, which released her first album, Little Girl Blue. A beautifully tender version of I Love You, Porgy was laid down at the suggestion of a friend who’d heard Billie Holiday do it, and Simone’s rendition soon started picking up radio play, becoming a surprise Top 20 US hit in 1959. Simone bristled at the comparisons with Holiday. “I didn’t like to be put in a box with other jazz singers because my musicianship was totally different, and in its own way superior,” she wrote in her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You. “It was a racist thing: ‘If she’s black she must be a jazz singer.’ It diminished me.”

2. My Baby Just Cares for Me

The deal Simone agreed with Bethlehem Records was shortsighted. She signed away the rights to all her early recordings in exchange for $3,000, which probably seemed like a lot of money at the time. That lack of forethought would cost her a fortune, and it wouldn’t be the last time she demonstrated a lack of financial nous. After Simone realised her mistake and went to Colpix Records, Bethlehem put out a cobbled together second album – Nina Simone and Her Friends – but it wasn’t until 1987, when My Baby Just Cares for Me exploded in Europe, that it really hit her pocket. That said, the exposure – the song featured in a perfume commercial – brought Simone to a new audience and allowed her to work only when she needed to until her death in 2003. (She recorded only one more studio album, A Single Woman, in 1993). It’s astonishing that My Baby Just Cares for Me managed to remain relatively obscure for so long given how good it is, featuring a jaw-dropping virtuoso piano solo that is the perfect conflation of her classical training and jazz improvisation, while her dolorous timbre, set against a prideful narrative and generally upbeat mood, creates an odd paradox. As on the beautiful He Needs Me, there’s a sense that the whole conceit about her paramour could be based entirely on a delusion.

3. Mississippi Goddam

With standards in her repertoire such as Work Song evoking the backbreaking toil of the chain gang, it was clear Simone’s sympathies were with the civil rights movement in the early 60s, but a self-penned protest song in response to cold-blooded murder saw her emerge as a figurehead in 1964. Civil rights activist Medgar Evers had been assassinated by a member of the White Citizens’ Council the year before, as well as the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four young girls were killed. Mississippi Goddam is a frustrated call to arms, a plea for mercy, a recalcitrant cry of defiance and an angry voice of reason crying out against the most untenable and unjust of situations. While Simone had much admiration for Martin Luther King, she didn’t necessarily subscribe to his doctrine of passive righteousness. “Can’t you see it, can’t you feel it in the air?” she wails, “I can’t stand the pressure much longer!”. Mississippi Goddam was controversial, not least because of the cursing in its title. “We released it as a single and it sold well, except in the south where we had trouble with distribution,” wrote Simone. “The excuse was profanity – Goddam! – but the real reason was obvious enough.”

4. Sinnerman

Cara instal ulang laptop asus k43u windows 7. The origin of Sinnerman (or Sinner Man before Simone dispensed with the spacing) is ambiguous, some claiming the traditional African-American spiritual started life as a Scottish folk song. The earliest known recorded version is Les Baxter’s 1956 rendition, though Simone would have almost certainly picked it up from her church, where she was the pianist from an early age. Her version, recorded live in New York in the mid-60s for her Pastel Blues album, has become the defining version, used for its high drama in a glut of movies including David Lynch’s Inland Empire, as well as being remixed by Felix da Housecat and sampled by Kanye West and Talib Kweli on the latter’s Get By (West is no stranger to sampling Simone, having garnered opprobrium for using the harrowing Strange Fruit as the basis for him to sound off about alimony). Sinnerman has become one of her trademark songs, and listening to its 11 minutes of heart-racing rhythms, thrills and spills and inspired moments of spontaneous invention, it’s not difficult to see how she picked up the High Priestess of Soul epithet. Simone performed many times in New York during the 60s, and her dream of playing Carnegie Hall was realised in 1963 but for one caveat: she wasn’t there to play her beloved Bach.

5. I Put a Spell on You

Simone didn’t write many of her own songs, but – as one of the finest interpreters of others’ tunes – she hardly needed to. Take Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ I Put a Spell on You, written in 1956. “I was just a normal blues singer. I was just Jay Hawkins,” said the composer. “It all sort of just fell in place. I found out I could do more destroying a song and screaming it to death.” It’s a deeply enjoyable, if slightly jarring, voodoo waltz with some sinister barking when Hawkins performs it in his bellicose fashion. At least that’s how it sounds compared with Simone’s version, which is smoother than a polished palatial floor. The swirling brass at the outset followed by Simone’s deep alto scowl, and then those irresistible, skittering glissandos can hardly fail to imbue the sense one is beholding something classic upon each listen. I Put a Spell on You glides effortlessly in through your ear, and before you know it, it has you right where it wants you.

6. Feeling Good

Simone might have resented being called a jazz musician but it’s hard to deny the big-band oomph of Feeling Good, possibly her best-loved song. It arose from the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd the year before, which was written and performed by Anthony Newley with words by Leslie Bricusse. Simone and Brooklyn-based producer Hal Mooney set about stripping away the tinkly intro to leave just her naked voice, building up tremendous tension before releasing it with a fusillade of bombastic brass. The rest of the track, with its staccato piano as counterpoint, is equally irresistible. Simone’s Feeling Good was yet another song that benefited from repeat plays on a 80’s commercial (this time for fabric conditioner) and since then it has been sampled a number of times by hip-hop artists, including Kanye West, for New Day on the Watch the Throne album with Jay Z. Aside from throwing in a megaphone, Muse were faithful to Simone’s arrangement when they covered it in 2001, a rendering NME readers voted best cover version of all time in 2010, which one hopes caused Muse some embarrassment.

7. Four Women

Simone’s interpretations of existing songs were so emphatic that other artists would often thieve her version rather than the original performer’s. For his album Wild Is the Wind, David Bowie admitted he was inspired to record a version of the title track after he met Simone in Los Angeles in 1975, while Jeff Buckley’s Lilac Wine slips uncannily into the metre chosen by the singer. Few artists had the audacity to cover her own composition Four Women though, such is its inimitability. Set over a stark, mid-paced groove, she presents to us four strong women of colour: Aunt Sarah, Safronia, Sweet Thing and Peaches, each describing themselves in the first person and conveying their personal suffering. Safronia for instance, sings: “My father was rich and white / he forced my mother late one night.” It’s a strange song given its structure, and with no chorus to speak of its simplicity is goosebump-inducingly effective. Simone was dismayed that some critics accused her of racial stereotyping despite her stature as an activist; Aunt Sarah says her hair is “wooly”, and some felt making her an aunt fell within the Aunt Jemima mammy archetype. “Black women didn’t know what the hell they wanted because they were defined by things they didn’t control,” Simone said defiantly. “And until they had the confidence to define themselves they’d be stuck in the same mess forever – that was the point the song made.”

8. I Ain’t Got No / I’ve Got Life

Simone recorded roughly as many live albums as she made in the studio, and some were a mixture of the two. For a performer as accomplished as she was with almost telepathic musical compadres like Al Shackman, one presumes the one-take nature of live work would agree with her. ‘Nuff Said is special in that it was recorded at the Westbury Music Fair three days after the assassination of Dr King, and as such it captures the raw emotions, the shock and the collective coming together that the tragedy brought – the show featured the tribute Why? (The King of Love is Dead), written by Simone’s bass player, Gene Taylor, shortly after he heard the news. Another song recorded in the studio a month later – or rather two songs pushed together from the musical Hair – also very much captures the mood of 1968. Ain’t Got No / I’ve Got Life is a joyous hippy anthem that celebrates the utopian values of the longed-for promised land. “Like most numbers from Hair, it could easily have been soon forgotten,” wrote Robert Dimery in 1,001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die. “Its inclusion on the serious-minded ’Nuff Said! is, on the face of it, surprising, but in Simone’s hands the call for freedom takes on a harder-edged civil rights tone, in keeping with the other tracks, while still managing to retain the upbeat mood.” It reached No 2 in the UK singles charts.

9. To Be Young, Gifted and Black

Another song that caught the mood in the late 60s was I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free, adopted as the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement when sung by Simone five years before it was co-opted by Barry Norman and the BBC’s Film … series. She upped the ante in 1969, recording a song she wrote herself – To Be Young, Gifted and Black – named after an unfinished play by her friend Lorraine Hansberry, who was the first black writer to have a hit Broadway show. Simone said Hansberry, who died from cancer aged 34, was her inspiration, having forced her to take the black movement seriously. The lyrics couldn’t be any less ambiguous or any more positive: “In the whole world you know / There are a billion boys and girls / Who are young, gifted and black / And that’s a fact!” The uplifting gospel number might have resonated with many, but after Simone left America in 1971 for a journey around the world that latest until the end of her days, she expressed alarm that the civil rights movement had seemingly lost its way and been usurped by disco. It’s no coincidence that her recording career began to fall off around this period.

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10. Baltimore

Simone would wait six years before she recorded another studio album and when she finally did, she disowned it because of her lack of involvement in arrangements, despite it receiving universal critical acclaim. Recorded with producer Creed Taylor in Brussels, the elegiac Everything Must Change is recognisably Simone, but on other tracks she’s in unchartered territory, including a Hall and Oates cover (Rich Girl) and a reggae-inspired Randy Newman number for this title track. The singer herself was wary of being pigeonholed and here she stretches to cover yet more ground, even if she doesn’t sound like she’s stretching much at all. After Baltimore, Simone’s recording career stuttered, with little else to add to the canon, though it hardly matters when there was such a wealth of great material recorded over the best part of two decades.

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