“I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free”: A Nina Simone Tribute

This piece is part of our series for Black History Month. You can read our piece on Black Love Songs here.

Deep and assertive, and yet still so fragile. I’m not sure why but I’ve paused every time I’ve tried to write this. Perhaps because it’s a heavy season. Perhaps because I’m unsure of where to start. Perhaps because I’m listening to Ms. Nina Simone.

Few artists have left an imprint on people’s souls like Nina Simone — and you could not be indifferent or hard-hearted after hearing her perform. I am moved each time. Even when I believe I’m casually listening in the shower or while making dinner, I have to stop and give her my attention. I have to pause.

Nina Simone was a Black woman born February 21 in North Carolina, 1933. If she were alive today, she would have been 92 years old. She was an unparalleled classical pianist, an acclaimed jazz and folk vocalist, and deeply steeped in the political. But today I am resisting the habit of immortalizing her into a deity. Today, I want to think of her as an instructor.

Nina challenged what I once thought was beautiful in music and in myself.

I’ve grown up blessed by a musical parent. Despite intense introversion as a child, my mother deeply encouraged my interest in singing — even though most of my early performances mostly consisted of me looking intently at my shoes. Because of her, I successfully auditioned for a middle school arts program.

But once I started that program, my pride was quickly replaced by insecurity. I had this low alto voice and a gravelly tone. And my peers had these bright, operatic soprano voices. An older girl once leaned over to ask me why I sounded like that. I lied and told her I was sick. Every attempt for a solo in my chorus ended up with me giving up before I could even make a sound. Who would want to hear my voice, anyway?

Then, a friend of mine showed me Nina. Before that, all I knew of her was “Feeling Good,” and at 13 years old, I was feeling anything but that. In fact, it wasn’t just my voice I was worried about in middle school — it was how I looked. In a predominantly white environment, I began to learn where I stood in the social order of things as a Black girl. It would be better if I were lighter. It would be better if my hair were looser. I would pinch my nose at night, hoping I could make it smaller somehow.

Still, to indulge my friend, I listened to Nina’s very first album because the title appealed to me — Little Girl Blue (1958). And, in the midst of all the dizzying pre-teen inner battles, I had to pause. Her voice — deep contralto, dark in color — was so beautiful and tender, and moved me more deeply than any lilting Disney voice I’d once so coveted.

And she challenged another thing I had coveted: whiteness. She was a dark-skinned Black woman, wearing her natural hair out and fluffed, who floated onto stages in front of packed rooms. As Ta-Nehisi Coates put it: “Simone was in possession of nearly every feature that we denigrated as children. And yet somehow she willed herself into a goddess.”

I realized why my friend, another Black girl in the chorus, showed me Nina. Maybe to put us on something of a self-love journey.

Nina taught me that art is always about searching — for what you want from the world and what you need from yourself.

As I grew older and more politicized, I was able to sink my teeth into the music that defines Nina Simone’s legacy — her resistance music.

Racism marked her career from its beginning. She intended to be — and trained as — a classical pianist. She wanted to be the world’s first Black concert pianist. Despite her Juilliard training and a very well-received audition, she was rejected by the top conservatory she’d been preparing for most of her life, the Curtis Institute of Music. This rejection — that she felt was rooted in anti-Blackness — forced her to pivot from studying at the conservatory to singing jazz and pop music to earn money — adopting the stage name Nina Simone so her parents wouldn’t find out she was playing at a bar.

In the 1960s, in the midst of the movement for Black liberation, she heard and answered the call. The music she performed during that period — often referenced as the “soundtrack to the civil rights era” — brought so much life and color to the movement. She became friends with thinkers and artists like Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin — and they influenced each other’s work. Nina’s resistance music also brought her a lot of precarity. Her album sales plummeted.

But famously she’d said, “How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?” She did more than reflect. She shaped.

A lot of protest music stands on the shoulders of “Mississippi Goddamn,” which she wrote after the 1963 Baptist Street Church bombing. It find myself admiring how Nina did not bypass the mourning and the anger of terror Black people face — that these songs, like “Why? (The King of Love is Dead,”) “Backlash Blues,” and “Go To Hell” were as important as the ones that invited hope.

So much of what Nina expressed was about searching for something greater than what she had. I’ve listened to “I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free” many times, but I feel like I’m finally close to understanding its evergreen message.

Performing has been my love for a long time, but lately, I’ve found myself empty of words. How could I write and perform something joyful? How could I be entertaining? But today, Nina reminds me — art is not just about entertainment. It’s about expressing longing. And from that longing, we can create a vision of the future that is greater than what we have.