To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story

On the DVD included in the just-released box set To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story, Simone explained to an interviewer in 1970 the effect she wanted her music to have. “I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a nightclub when I’ve performed, I just want them to be to pieces,” she says. “I want to go in that den of those elegant people with their old ideas, smugness, and just drive them insane.”

What’s fascinating about Simone is not just how well she succeeded in shaking people up, but how she did it in so many different ways. Just when you think you’ve got her figured out, she jumps ship, using genres like jazz, soul, blues and folk as mere stepping stones, yet putting her full weight on each she goes by.

Ironically, her penchant for skipping around stylistically is probably also what held her back from mainstream stardom--in the U.S., that is. Simone (born Eunice Waymon) had great commercial success in the U.K. during her lifetime. She’s probably known best to a younger generation through artists like Feist and Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond) covering her songs, which is fitting for a woman who spent much of her career reclaiming other artists’ songs.

On this 51-track, three-disc (plus DVD) retrospective, the “High Priestess of Soul” tackles show tunes (“Feeling Good,” “Ain’t Got No-I Got Life”), French pop (“Ne Me Quitte Pas”), Dylan (“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” “The Times They Are A-Changin,’” “Just Like a Woman”), the Beatles (“Here Comes the Sun”) and plenty more. To my ears, the only essential track missing is Simone’s take on the African-American spiritual “Sinnerman.”

Her fierce advocacy for civil rights was inseparable from many of her re-appropriated songs, but originals such as “Four Women” and “Mississippi Goddam”--a song she wrote after four girls were killed in an Alabama church bombing in 1963--boldly display Simone’s outrage. The live version of “Mississippi” on this compilation penetrates even more deeply since it was performed on April 7, 1968--just days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

Those live tracks are some of the best inclusions in this retrospective. They reveal a performer whose aberrant voice and persona were so huge they often needed to be set free from the confines of the studio and loosed onto an open stage. A medley of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” and “Today is a Killer,” complete with some of Simone’s improvised lyrics, waxes and wanes for a full 18 minutes.

Simone’s catalog is vast. She was known for releasing seven albums in a three-year span. In that same interview on the DVD, Simone said she was scared of not going fast enough to do everything she was supposed to do before she died, which she did in 2003. But after listening to this impressive compilation, I’d say she surely did everything. And then some.