When I was young, I knew Nina Simone more for her reputation than her artistic achievements. As someone who devoured every music book, magazine or documentary I could, I was aware of her, and intrigued, but I’d heard little of her actual music. Those were the days when it wasn’t actually that easy to listen to an artist, even if you wished to. There weren’t any ‘Essential Nina Simone’ playlists or Top 10 Nina Simone albums listicles to look up online. You might get a similar list in a magazine from time to time, but that was no guarantee you’d be able to actually hear the albums in question. I had to rely on the CDs that happened to be in stock in the record shops in my town, and so bought a cheap live album from the early 1960s, which I enjoyed, but didn’t have a huge impact on me.

Whilst articles about Simone tended to be positive about her music, they often focused more on her personality. She was described as difficult and demanding. Unpredictable at best, insane at worst. I was young and ignorant, and took this at face value. I’d heard the Fugees lyric “I’ll be Nina Simone and defecating on your microphone” and wasn’t entirely sure if they meant it literally. I thought of her essentially a madwoman, being too ignorant to understand the sexist, racist framings that had led to my view.

Perhaps influenced by this, I didn’t appreciate her music as much as it deserved. There were only a handful of her songs I would hear on anything like a regular basis, and I took this to mean that she only had a few really good songs (a mistake I made with other artists, although sometimes it turned out to be correct).

The album that changed my views was, strangely enough, not one of her own, but a DJ mix called MineSweeper Suite, by dj/rupture. It’s an album I’m sure I’ll write about another time, but to summarise here, it is a dense, complex mix of hip-hop, discordant electronica, Arabic, African and Jamaican music. A very full on album, but the key moment in the mix is when the noise and intensity drops away, and we are left with just the sound of a piano and a voice. The voice of Nina Simone singing ‘Plain Gold Ring’.

It’s a song about being the ‘other woman’, involved in an affair with a married man. It is stark, plaintive, and incomparably beautiful. It’s a good song, but elevated to greatness by Simone’s voice and the feelings she manages to convey. Sadness of course, but tinged with resignation more than despair. It takes a great singer to convey subtle, complex emotions in this way, and even this early in her career (it is from her debut album in 1959) she is certainly that. It is not a song she wrote herself, but she makes it hers, and in anyone’s else’s hands it would not have worked nearly so well.

Side note – the guy who wrote it also co-wrote ‘Great Balls of Fire’

From this point on, I delved deeper into her music, and the more I heard, the more I felt she was under-appreciated. Plain Gold Ring was one of the greatest songs I had ever heard, and it wasn’t even in her top 20 most well known songs, maybe not even the top 50 or 100 (it is one of only three songs on her debut album not to merit its own Wikipedia page, if that is any way to judge).

She is sometimes referred to as a flawed genius, but the emphasis tends to be on the flaws rather than the genius. And genius is an overused word, to be sure, but maybe appropriate for a singer of songs such as ‘Feeling Good’, ‘Baltimore’, ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ ‘See-Line Woman’ and so many more, who crossed boundaries of jazz, blues, R&B, folk and classical music. Who covered subject matters from the deeply personal to the deeply political in ways that no-one had before, and wrote songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ ‘Four Women’ and ‘Young, Gifted and Black’

A number of things explain the relative lack of appreciation. Most obviously, she’s a black woman, in a world where the genius label tends to be bestowed on white men. A white man with a comparable body of work would be unequivocally considered a genius, the flaws secondary, or ignored completely. Dylan, Lennon, Bowie, were or are all flawed individuals, but those flaws are not considered to overshadow their talents. Few black men get labelled a genius, perhaps Prince or Stevie Wonder? Even fewer women get that label, and black women fewer still.

Simone also had the misfortune to be operating at a time when rock n roll, and then just rock, were the dominant forms of music. In particular once The Beatles and Dylan came along, it was those working in the rock milleiu, who were both performers and songwriters, who tended to get the genius label. As noted above, Simone did write songs, brilliant ones, but was primarily known as an interpreter of songs by others, at a time when that skill had lost respect. I would argue forcefully that even if she had never written a song in her life, the rest of her body of work is comparable to any of the other ‘geniuses’ mentioned above.

I’m not even sure that genius is a meaningful or useful label to apply to musicians, and I tend to lean towards the view it is not. But if it is going to be used, it is important to consider who it is applied to and why. A lifetime of media consumption has told me repeatedly that The Beatles are geniuses, but rarely told me the same about Nina Simone, and it took me a long time to question why.

To be fair, it does feel the pendulum has swung back a little in Simone’s favour in recent years. There was a Netflix documentary ‘What Happened Miss Simone’, Warren Ellis’s book ‘Nina Simone’s Gum’ and a generally renewed appreciation of her music. It still feels that she’s not as recognised as she should be, as one of the most talented, most important artists of the 20th century, whether you want to call her a genius or not. And if you don’t agree, I’d only ask that you take a few minutes out of your day, and listen to Plain Gold Ring.