What was once an opera piece is now an illustration of blues at its rawest. Nina foregoes the operatic style in favor of a lush blues burn that painfully encapsulates its lyrics’ nuanced descriptions of mourning like the eternal absence of the sound of a lover’s footsteps coming up the stairs. The character Serena sings “My Man’s Gone Now” over her husband's body after he was killed in a brawl the previous night. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald released their adaptations of the score in a 1958 album Porgy and Bess, with Miles Davis releasing his version in 1959. It’s a rendition of a song from* Porgy and Bess*, a 1934 opera by George Gershwin with an undeniable influence on jazz.
“My Man’s Gone Now” is the most heart-wrenching songs on the album, and a look at its origins is telling. Regardless, many of the songs have backstories as intriguing as the musical textures their recordings harbor. Maybe it’s difficult to imagine the creation of these songs because most of us have never known a world without this momentous 1967 album.
Maybe it’s hard to conceptualize the fruition of these songs because the blues-as a sound, as a genre, as a feeling-are absorbing they embody complex histories and an encompassing emotional state that spans generations of human conditions. Pouring out through a voice as rich as fertile earth itself, the 12 songs on Nina Simone Sings the Blues feel like they weren’t created, but rather have always existed, incubating beneath layers of soil until Simone decided she’d harvest them to share with the world.