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Remembering the great Nina Simone who was born on this day in 1933. Known for creating urgent emotional intensity by singing songs of love, protest, and Black empowerment in a dramatic style, with a rough-edged voice, Simone’s bearing and stage presence earned her the title “the High Priestess of Soul”. Onstage, she incorporated monologs and dialogues with the audience into the program, and often used silence as a musical element. A friend of Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and neighbour of Malcom X, she became involved in the the civil rights movement. She was deeply immersed in movement politics, debates and organizing. Her song “Mississippi Goddamn,” written after the 1963 bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama, became an anthem of the civil rights movement. Simone and Lorraine Hansberry discussed “Marx, Lenin, and revolution” instead of fashion and men,” and through her music and her political activism, she committed herself to “fighting for a different kind of society,” one founded on equality. Here, she is performing “I Put a Spell On You” live in 1968.