‘Feeling Good’: the vital importance of Nina Simone’s classic hit
The world tends to focus a lot on the struggles that can make you defeated and depressed. In comparison, however, Nina Simone knew the bolder choice was often to have hope.
This is something that she carried, overtly or otherwise, for most of her life and career. It came with the territory of being a young Black girl in the 1940s and ‘50s, facing the weight of racism at such a tender age when she was discriminated against and refused entry into music schools. Her success was less of a natural occurrence than it was a rebellion.
Yet even despite her close ties with the civil rights movement and the inevitable moments of hardship and strife that came with this, what Simone soon realised was that shouldering the heaviness of an entire community’s fight for freedom was often too much to bear. Possibly this was part of the reason she attempted to distance herself from the movement in later years as the pressure mounted, but it was only because she had achieved so much.
In this sense, one of the greatest feats she ever mastered was the defined choice to be positive. That might seem too much of an oversimplified way of putting it, but it still was the basic genesis of what the singer wanted to convey in the feeling of her 1965 hit, ‘Feeling Good’. That song has since become a stratospheric standard of soul, reinvented by everyone from Muse to Michael Bublé, but what it really represents is a beacon to the Black population.
The song wasn’t Simone’s to start out with, however. It originally featured in the 1964 British musical, The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd, in which the main Black character sang as he emerged victorious from a ‘game’ against two white opponents. It was instantly obvious that the lyrics transcended to so much more, though, and Simone set about creating a cover for her album, I Put A Spell on You, released the following year.
Despite never officially releasing ‘Feeling Good’ as its own single, it clearly lit a fire under Simone for what she wanted all her messages to embody. Yes, of course, there were difficulties and hard times, but the mark of a warrior was not just to fight this with anger. It was to fight with a smile on your face.
That was the essential spirit of what made, and still makes, ‘Feeling Good’ so vitally important in the context of the civil rights movement, as well as everything that has come in its wake. Simone followed it up with celebratory anthems such as ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’ over the next years, which spoke volumes about the type of beacon she wanted to be.
Naturally, that pursuit of happiness didn’t mean that the shackles were suddenly lifted, and Simone felt free as a bird. Bleak moments, thoughts, and events still persisted through her life, which was kept no secret or surprise to anyone who saw her. But behind it, the vitality of her lioness heart never left.
You can dissect and laud Simone’s musical virtues all you want, of which she obviously had many. Yet what stands as her greatest legacy is not necessarily what she could perform behind the piano, but the messages she communicated alongside it. Yes, the world could be dark, but as long as there was a new dawn and a new day, she would always feel good.
