What Happened, Miss Simone?

Nina Simone aka Eunice Kathleen Waymon, was born in 1933, the same year as my father.  She died in 2003, at the age of 70.  I think I've been listening to her music since the mid 80's, when I was a college radio DJ at UC Santa Cruz. This was around the time when digital compact discs were just coming out and some radio stations were in transition still playing actual record albums. You can hear the analog hiss and some songs would actually skip and skip live on the air, once in awhile the CD player skips too. Memorable moments and often hilarious.

For almost thirty years since then, I still haven't heard anyone else so eclectic, dynamic, fierce or political as Nina Simone. No one. She was fearless, confrontational, non-mainstream, anti-establishment, anti-commercial, uniquely bold, vulnerable and always dynamic. "My Baby Just Cares For Me", "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", "Sinnerman" and "Backlash Blues" with lyrics by Langston Hughes were a few of my favorites from the High Priestess of Soul. She was an artist who could radiate raw emotions with just a single look and a single repeated chord. So simple yet so powerful. Nina Simone was a patron saint of rebellion. She is consider by many to be a legend in modern music and not just jazz music. Yet, many people have never heard of her.

"How can you be an artist and NOT reflect the times?" she said in an interview back around 1967.
She performed the song "Mississippi Goddam" at the end of the Selma to Montgomery March for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1965. It was banned in several states in the South after that. I'm guessing the states were Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina.

Fifty years later, this song is as relevant as ever.
Just change the title from Mississippi to South Carolina with the current situation in Charleston.  Timely and timeless.