29 Jul To Be Young Gifted and Black: First Listen –

In 1969, Nina Simone told Ebony Magazine, “I hope the day comes when I will be able to sing more love songs, when the need is not quite so urgent to sing protest songs. But for now, I don’t mind.”

This tension shaped much of her career. While many of her most popular hits were her covers of love songs such as “I Loves You, Porgy” and “I Put A Spell on You,” civil rights activists canonized her as “The High Priestess of Soul” for composing and singing the protest songs “Mississippi Goddam” and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.”

But Simone also transcended musical categorization altogether. She could imbue a torch song with such potency and resistance that she often ended up redefining the very meaning of the song itself. For how else can we explain Simone’s transformation of the love song, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” whose original melody and chorus lyric were written by Horace Ott after a temporary falling out with his girlfriend, Gloria Caldwell, into what sounds like a musical meditation on racial suffering and black existentialism.

Read more here and listen below: