It was a time when folkies were discovering jazz and blues and the jazz players were listening for influence. Simone's style of mixing things up, defying category, made her perfect for the scene. Once the critics alighted on Simone, however, they felt the need to classify her music and referred to her as a jazz singer.

In her 1991 autobiography, "I Put a Spell on You," she discusses how the term was simply a box critics put all black performers in. "Calling me a jazz singer was a way of ignoring my musical background because I didn't fit into white ideas of what a black performer should be," she writes. "It was a racist thing." Simone eventually became a "jazz-and-something-else singer" in the press, but, she says, she identified mostly as a folk singer. There was more of a folk-and-blues foundation than jazz in her playing.

In 1961 Simone married Andy Stroud, a New York cop. He became her manager, handling all her bookings and deals. Some say he deserves credit for many of her compositions during the near decade of their marriage. When she posed for the record jacket of the album "Nina Sings Ellington" in 1962, she was eight months pregnant. After Lisa Celeste Stroud's birth it seems Simone put her dreams of being a classical pianist behind her, resigning herself to incidental popular fame.

When Medgar Evers was shot and four schoolchildren were killed in a church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, Simone wrote "Mississippi Goddam" in a white heat and found herself smack in the middle of the civil rights movement. Having initially shied away from protest songs as she found them simple and unimaginative, insulting to the very people they were supposed to uplift, Simone realized she had to be involved in the black struggle. Soon she counted Stokely Carmichael, Miriam Makeba, Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry among her close friends.

A teacher of mine, whose uncle dated Simone, saw her at the Village Vanguard with his father during the early '60s. He told me that before she began to sing, she asked if there were any black people in the audience. Only he and his father stood up, somewhat uncomfortably, and Simone said, "I'm singing only to you. I don't care about the others." It was a time when such a remark made the white audience clap madly.

Her protest music, along with her famed "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," were recorded on the Philips label, a Mercury Records subsidiary, where Simone recorded seven albums from 1964 to 1967. In 1965, she released the album "I Put a Spell on You," with the title song by Screamin' Jay Hawkins. During her association with Philips, Simone would release, among others, "Pastel Blues," "Let It All Out" and "High Priestess of Soul," all with her predicable blend of the completely unpredictable, containing traditionals like "Sinnerman," "Strange Fruit," Dylan's "Hollis Brown" and Irving Berlin's "This Year's Kisses." But it was infused with a new level of consciousness, mirroring the state of the country.

In 1966 Simone switched to RCA records where she recorded nine albums and some of her most famous songs. Her 1968 album, "'Nuff Said," contained tracks as various as "Ain't Got No/I Got Life," a medley from the '60s musical "Hair," the spiritual "Take My Hand Precious Lord" and her own "Backlash Blues," taken from the poetry of Langston Hughes.

The next year the album "To Love Somebody" was released with the title song by Barry and Robin Gibb. It made the British Top 10. The album had three Bob Dylan covers including "I Shall Be Released," as well as songs by Leonard Cohen and Pete Seeger, along with "Revolution," a protest song co-written by Simone and Weldon Irvine Jr. "To Love Somebody" was my introduction to Simone, and I'll never forget the way she berated her musicians during the intro to "Revolution." She harshly tells them, "Hold it! This is louder than usual. Let it groove on its own thing." Cool. I thought. This woman can kick butt ...

The increased militancy of the late '60s, along with the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and the general decentralization of the civil rights movement, drove Simone away from the United States. What she and so many had believed could be achieved she felt had failed; she fled to Barbados for the first break in performing in years. In 1971 she and her husband divorced and she returned to Barbados, becoming the "kept" woman of the married prime minister, Earl Barrow. It was the year she recorded "Here Comes the Sun," with Dylan's "Just Like a Woman," Stan Vincent's "O-o-h Child," Jerry Jeff Walker's "Mr. Bojangles" and Jacques Revaux's "My Way." It is a collection that speaks more of personal than political freedom.

In 1974, she cut her ties with RCA and in so doing with America for good. Simone would never return to the States permanently, but moved to Africa and throughout Europe, settling in France. She saw the States as a place where blacks weren't getting what they deserved. She felt that America and the recording industry had deserted her.

She told Interview magazine in January 1997, "I think it's hopeless for the majority of black people. I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don't think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die."

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