The original “angry black woman”
This album cover was on display at Enoch Pratt. I had not known she sang that song. The cover by The Animals is much more familiar. I researched it.
The song is perfectly fitting for her.
It is the plea of someone who has found out that, yet again, others rightly took offense at something the person said or did. It happens to such people over and over. They call it “misunderstanding.” There’s no more misunderstanding than if you’d robbed a bank.
Nina Simone was a black American concert pianist and recording artist, proficient in all the keyboard works of the 18th and 19th century European composers. She was also an extremely bitter person, prone to lash out at others.
In that way, she was like Azealia Banks, in constant quarrels.
She attributed much of the trouble she endured, to prejudice against her exceptionally dark skin tone (colorism).
The single most outstanding event of her life, as reported by Wikipedia:
Demonstrating a talent with the piano, she performed at her local church. Her concert debut, a classical recital, was given when she was 12. Simone later said that during this performance, her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for white people.[13] She said that she refused to play until her parents were moved back to the front,[14][15] and that the incident contributed to her later involvement in the civil rights movement.[16]
She never got over it.
(The above narrative differs from the apocryphal version which I had taken as true: that actually, in question was her graduation recital from Julliard, not a performance at a local church.)
I adduce her bitterness stems from a genetically based neurological condition. Her children are the same way:
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