Happy 55th Anniversary to Nina Simone’s seventh studio album I Put A Spell On You, originally released in June 1965 (specific release date N/A).
Anyone who has paid any more than cursory attention to Nina Simone’s career or watched any of the numerous documentaries that have detailed her professional and personal life will know two things unequivocally. Firstly, that she was a musical giant, a legend who truly merits the word being used about her and, secondly, she was often labeled a “complex” character.
“Complex” though is code for “difficult” in some minds and nothing screams ignoramus quite like the tired old racist trope of the “angry black woman.” Born in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21, 1933, Eunice Kathleen Waymon could hardly have entered the world nearer the bottom of society’s pile. As a black woman born in the rural south of the USA, a future was far from guaranteed, let alone an opportunity to shine in the way she did. If she was angry, then there was (literally) a whole world of reasons to be angry.
Of course, the scars of being raised in a racist, segregated state gave rise to mental health challenges later in her life, as her daughter would attest to. But it is important not to fall into the tired clichés expounded by the very society that caused the conditions to arise.
Raised in the church by her Methodist minister mother and handyman/preacher father, she showed her astonishing abilities as early as the age of three. Playing the piano by ear led to her taking a place in her mother’s church. An English woman named Muriel Mazzanovich had moved to Eunice’s town and it wasn’t long before the prodigious young girl, soon to be known as Nina Simone, was developing a lifelong love of Bach, Chopin and other giants of classical music alongside her teacher.
As an aside though it should be noted that this label “classically trained” can be another coded way of asserting superiority of a predominantly white art form over the “savage” sounds of jazz, blues or other music of black origin. Here it is used to primarily indicate the range of music that Simone was able to master, seemingly without trouble. After all, what could be a higher art form than the service of a congregation before God?
This breadth of talent was something that she, herself, touched on regularly in her 1991 autobiography I Put A Spell On You. She noted that critics “…tried to find a neat slot to file it away in. It was difficult for them because I was playing popular songs in a classical style with a classical piano technique influenced by cocktail jazz. On top of that I included spirituals and children’s songs in my performances and those sorts of songs were automatically identified with the folk movement.” So was she a “difficult woman” or an extravagantly gifted one?
For someone often associated with social protest songs, it took a little while for this side of her to see the light of day. She elaborated as to why in her autobiography, reflecting, “How can you take the memory of a man like Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three-and-a-half minutes and a simple tune? . . . I didn’t like ‘protest music’ because a lot if it was so simple and unimaginative, it stripped the dignity away from the people it was trying to celebrate.”
Yet as the 1960s dawned and the push for civil rights grew under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and others, two events changed Simone forever. The murder of the aforementioned Medgar Evers in June of 1963 and the horrific Alabama church bombing in September of the same year fueled the fire that finally set free the fury and injustice in Simone’s music with “Mississsippi Goddamn.”
Given the incendiary years that followed, you’d be forgiven for thinking that 1965’s I Put A Spell On You would be crammed full of withering social commentary and pointed “discussion” of the power structures that enabled white supremacy to retain its stranglehold. Yet it wasn’t.
This can partly be put down to the rate at which she recorded—the previous year (1964) had seen her release three albums and she would go on to release the markedly different Pastel Blues later in 1965. In fact, between 1964 and 1967, she released ten albums in a frenzied outpouring of artistic excellence. Nevertheless, it seems strange that amongst the tumult of the world outside her window, she would record her most pop-orientated record.
And by “pop” of course, I mean popular. Three of the twelve tracks contained here regularly feature on “Greatest Hits” packages and playlists that act as portals to the rest of her repertoire and it performed well commercially. None of the songs included are written by Simone, but she does what all great musical interpreters do—she crawls inside the songs and finds what resonates with her and claims them as her own.
Of course, the arrangements combine with her mercurial talents to create moments of celestial beauty. Here the arrangements are handled by Hal Mooney (who worked with Simone through much of the run in the mid ‘60s mentioned above) who had also worked with those towering vocal geniuses Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington in the late 1950s. It was a well-made pairing that demonstrated its power from the first track.
“I Put A Spell On You” was originally written and recorded by that most bizarre of bluesmen, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. His hog-snorting, rollicking, embryonic rock & roll version is quite something to behold, but Simone and Mooney transform it into a lush, beguiling symphony of obsession—the magic comes not just from the title. The spine-tingling piano allied to the swooning strings conjures a heady brew that is only further steeped in sweltering sensuality by the stuttering, insistent sax.
Another of the “greatest hits” is her stunningly forlorn take on Jacques Brel’s impeccable “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” Though her pronunciation is a little rough around the edges, her reading of the classic drips with heartbreak. The gently swaying strings, the plangent harp and Simone’s teetering fragility evoke the deepest of feelings. Her voice quivers and quavers with sadness in ways that plumb the depths of the traumatic experience that powered Brel’s composition.
Further on is the majestic revelry of Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse’s “Feeling Good.” Written for their musical The Roar Of The Greasepaint – The Smell Of The Crowd, it has long since outlived its parent to become a staple of modern song, covered by acts as varied as Muse and George Michael. None of which compare to Simone’s triumphant rendition. The simple optimism of her unaccompanied intro gives way to bold blasts of brass and the unfettered joy of Mooney’s strings and Simone’s perfect piano lines to create a swirling, dramatic and unabashed slice of joy in the face of such a repugnant society.
Those three bona fide classics covered, there is ample evidence on the album that the combination of Simone’s artistry and Mooney’s arrangements is golden. “Tomorrow Is My Turn” swings hard and has yet more stellar piano work from Simone and a set of strings that echo a certain 007, while “Marriage Is For Old Folks” is as jaunty as the title would suggest and offers a totally different perspective on Simone. Here she demonstrates a deft, breezy touch that might not be the first thing that springs to mind when thinking of her legacy.
The relative simplicity of the harp/flute combination on “Beautiful Land” finds Simone able to relax and deliver a carefree delivery of another tune from the aforementioned musical that begat “Feeling Good” and there, lurking in plain sight at the end of the album is a dramatic slice of pop in the shape of “Take Care Of Business,” given extra gravitas by the presence of Simone and the production and arrangement of Mooney—castanets click, horns punch and strings sweep to elevate the finale.
This album, and those that coagulate around it from the mid ‘60s represent an especially fertile period in Simone’s artistic life—a time when she wrote extraordinary songs and inhabited other people’s songs to the point of rendering her versions the definitive one, and this album demonstrates the latter extremely clearly. As a jump-off point for going both backwards and forwards in her discography it is perfect. If you haven’t done so yet, dive in.
LISTEN: