The performer is Nina Simone. This version is just her and a piano. There are other recordings on the web with other instruments added into the mix, but those versions seem a little bit too fancy for my ears. The stripped-down version has so much more power.
I'd suggest you hit play and minimise the window -- the images in the video are very confronting if you want to focus on the content of the song.
In preparing this little show-and-tell I ran across an old BBC interview for HARDtalk between Tim Sebastian and Nina Simone. Sebastian asked what Simone sought to do through her music, and the response was quite stunning. Here's my transcription of the first part of the interview below:
TS: Tell me about music as a political weapon
NS: Oh now, that's a hard one. As a political weapon, it has helped me for thirty years defend the rights of American blacks and third-world people all over the world, to defend them with protest songs, and it helps to change the world.
TS: When you get up on the stage and you sing, what's in your mind -- just the singing?
NS: No, to move the audience. To make them conscious of what has been done to my people around the world.
TS: So you sing from anger?
NS: No, I sing from intelligence. I sing from letting them know that I know who they are, and what they have done to my people around the world, and that's not anger. Anger has its place. Anger has fire. And fire moves things. But I sing from intelligence, I don't want them to think that I don't know who they are darling.
TS: Who are they?
NS: They are the white people around the world, with the exception of Nelson Mandella, whom I met this year.
Watch it all here:
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