Raw Piano and Unvarnished Emotion
Simone at the piano, singing the blues without arrangement tricks or soft edges.
Nina Simone Sings the Blues marks her first record for RCA Victor, and it sounds like someone who has something to say and isn't interested in smoothing it over. The piano is close and direct—you hear her fingers on the keys, the pedal work, the weight she puts into each phrase. There's no lush orchestration here, no strings to sweeten the deal. It's her voice and the instrument, mostly, with a band playing straightforward support. That stripped-down approach means everything lands harder. When Simone digs into a blues standard, you feel the deliberation in it, the way she bends notes and holds them longer than a less patient singer would. The performances have the quality of someone working something out in real time rather than delivering a finished product.
This album sits early in her career, when she was still relatively new to recording and moving between labels. RCA gave her different footing than her previous work for Colpix and Philips, and that fresh start shows in how direct and unselfconscious these recordings sound. There's a confidence here that doesn't need a lot of production to justify itself. The blues material lets her do what she does best—find the weight and the loneliness in a song and sit with it. AllMusic gave it a perfect rating, and Entertainment Weekly called it strong work, which lines up with what you actually hear: this is Simone playing well, singing with purpose, and refusing to make the blues anything other than what it is.
If you're coming to Simone for the first time, you might want to start elsewhere—something like I Put a Spell on You (1965) shows her range more completely. But if you want to hear her at the piano, focused and direct, without the later studio machinery, this is it. The reissue added tracks in 1991 and again in 2006, so there are ways to dig deeper into the session material, but the core record is the thing that matters.
