Best nina simone songs list

No one sang like Nina Simone. So why did filmmaker Cynthia Mort let the star of her critically-derided new biopic on the legend, Zoe Saldana, sing every lyric? While Saldana does possess a passable croon, it communicates none of the character, hurt or mystery that made Nina so stellar. Would it have killed her to lip-synch?

The decision not to do so in the movie Nina, which opened Friday, turns out to be an even bigger problem than the already much-talked-about fact that Saldana bears no physical resemblance to the woman she’s supposed to be playing. Instead of flinching through the film, then, you should spend that time basking in Simone’s most peerless recordings.

Between 1958 and 1993, the singer (who died in 2003) captured scores of amazing performances. Though they mostly found her covering other people’s material, Simone’s arrangements, informed by her classical training, and her phrasings, drawn from jazz, re-cast the compositions entirely. A few pieces she did write became classics, including “Mississippi Goddam” and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” But paramount was Simone’s performance, a mix of fierce inflections and edgy enunciations that eliminated any line between what she felt and what she conveyed:

1. “I Loves You Porgy”

In 1958, Simone scored her sole Top 20 hit with a take on the George Gershwin classic. Her amber vibrato communicates equal parts eros and need.

2. “Suzanne”

Simone performed a total tear-down on Leonard Cohen’s touchstone. She re-structured his melody as a series of ascending, prickly piano chords, lending each line the urgency of a question that can’t be answered.

3. “Mississippi Goddam”

In her roiling civil rights anthem, Simone plunked the piano with a righteous power that threatened to pummel injustice into dust.

4. “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”

While artists from The Animals to Joe Cocker have cut superb versions of this song, Simone’s take isolates the nar

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in North Carolina on Feb. 21, 1933, Nina Simone went from a child prodigy pianist to one of the most impactful jazz/blues/soul/rock artists of the 20th century. 

Simone passed away on April 21, 2003. However, her many recordings and intense live performances are still resonating today.

“All I’m trying to do all the time is just open people up, so they can let themselves be open to somebody else,” Simone told filmmaker Peter Rodis in the documentary Nina: An Historical Perspective . 

I always thought I was shaking people up,” Simone continued. “But now I want to go at it more, I want to go at it coldly. I want to shake people up that when they leave [a performance], I want them to be to pieces.” 

She could sing a melancholy blues, captivate a crowd, and take the piano to new places. But for many, the fire she brought to her protest songs during the Civil Rights era are where her music transcended even her own already-impressive career and carved her a singular home in music history.  

Below are five songs that shook the world and left a lasting impact. 

1 – Mississippi Goddam 

If any one song is Simone’s most impactful, this is it. The song is famously Simone’s reaction to the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers and the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing that killed four young black girls (and partly blinded a fifth) that same year. Simone reportedly wrote the song in just one hour. When first performed and then released on record in 1964, it was an angry shout directly in the face of the bigotry, hatred, violence, and death that Black Americans were enduring – and had been for centuries. Once “Mississippi Goddam” was out in the world, Simone’s music took a new turn and never looked back. 

2 – Four Women

Not as immediately in your face as “Mississippi Goddam,” SimoneR

Photo by Gilles Petard/Getty Images

Soothsayer, chastiser, conjurer, philosopher, historian, actor, politician, archivist, ethnographer, Black love proselytizer: She showed up on the frontlines of people-powered mass disturbances, delivering the good word (“It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day”) or shining discomforting light on the stubborn edifice of Southern white power (“Why don’t you see it?/Why don’t you feel it?”). And even when illness set in, and exile didn’t soften her grief for fallen friends and their unfinished revolution, she faltered for a time but ultimately stayed the course. She was fastidiously focused, insouciantly exploratory, and ferociously inventive at her many legendary, marathon concerts—Montreux, Fort Dix—the ones in which her mad skills, honed during her youthful years in late-night supper club jam sessions, returned in full. She was epic, our journey woman, the one who was capable of taking us to the ineffable, joyous elsewhere in that “Feeling Good” vocal improvisation that closes out that track.

Today, we return to her more passionately than ever before, looking to her for answers, parables, strategies—not only for how to survive, but how to end this thing called white supremacist patriarchy that some of us had naïvely believed was ever-so-excruciatingly self-destructing. Since her death, her iconicity has grown, spreading to the world of hip-hop (which, as the scholar Salamishah Tillet has shown, frequently samples her radicalism), to academia, where studies of Simone—articles and conference papers, seminars and book projects—pile high, making inroads in a segment of university culture previously cornered by Dylanologists. We take her with us to the weekend marches. Our students cue her up, summoning her wisdom and fortitude during the rallies.

This massive old-new love for our Nina is a way of being, and her sound encapsulates the pursuit of emotional knowledge and ethical bravery. She forges our awakening.  I said as much a few wee