There’s a humor to “Marriage Is for Old Folks” and an empathy to “You’ve Got to Learn” that can’t be expressed in technical terms like range and depth, but Simone’s animated vocal performance conveys these essential qualities of the songs.
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But Simone is one of the most distinctive sounds in popular music, and she knew how to use every part of it. Her singing voice was unusually low for a woman (a contralto) and it had a smaller range than those of most other popular singers (less than two octaves-in comparison, Taylor Swift has a two-octave range, while Ariana Grande and Christina Aguilera’s voices span four octaves). “Marriage Is for Old Folks” and “Take Care of Business” have the punch of vintage big band numbers thanks to their horn sections, and when the brass comes in 40 seconds into Simone’s definitive version of “Feeling Good,” it hits with the force of a beat drop.Ĭonductor-arrangers Hal Mooney (who also produced all of Simone’s Philips output) and Horace Ott do a lot to turn these good songs into great songs, but crucially, they never overpower Simone herself, either as a vocalist or as a personality. The strings transform the title track-written and originally sung by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins-from a campy rock ‘n’ roll incantation to something with the grace and gravity of John Barry’s James Bond scores the same can be said for “Tomorrow Is My Turn,” whose post-chorus seems to lift a chord progression directly from the superspy’s theme. But this was one of Simone’s first albums to feature orchestration, and where its predecessor, Broadway-Blues-Ballads, at times felt weighed down by the lusher arrangements, they’re handled much more effectively here. Simone’s music can be tough to categorize, drawing from blues, jazz, and even folk without sounding beholden to any particular genre. I Put a Spell on You is, for lack of a better word, Simone’s pop album. Freshly reissued on vinyl by Verve/UMe, I Put a Spell on You and Pastel Blues present the two sides of Simone’s musical identity as distinctly as possible-a pair of contrasting self-portraits, both complete as their own works yet neither representative of her career writ large. But Simone’s metamorphosis from pop diva to civil rights crusader was neither overnight nor total, as exemplified by the two records that she released in 1965. Simone, a Juilliard-trained classical pianist turned Greenwich Village darling, was at the peak of her popularity when she signed to Philips Records in 1964, and with this change in labels she became an outspoken activist her first album for Philips that year, In Concert, concluded with the incendiary “Mississippi Goddam,” written in response to the killing of Medgar Evers and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. This was also the year that Nina Simone released two of her most essential records. And when King took to the streets of Chicago to demand fair housing laws, he was met by white mobs even more hostile than those that received him in the South. Riots flared over housing discrimination and police brutality in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood. The passage of the Voting Rights Act did nothing to ameliorate the unemployment and poverty that many Black Americans dealt with, not just in the South but across the country. But there were tragedies as well as triumphs, such as the assassination in February of Malcolm X, an advocate for Black militancy often contrasted with King. (The late Representative John Lewis, among others, was beaten unconscious by law enforcement during the first march.) The brutality with which Alabama State Troopers and Ku Klux Klansmen responded to these marches galvanized then-President Lyndon Johnson into taking action on voting rights, and later that summer he signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
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helped lead a series of marches from Selma to Montgomery, protesting Alabama’s obstruction of efforts to register Black voters. Augustine, as well as his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. Following successful desegregation campaigns in Birmingham and St. 1965 was a pivotal year in the American civil rights movement.
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