Nina’s “My Sweet Lord” is the most soul-stirring, truly “live” performance of the song you’re likely ever to hear. Featuring the Bethany Baptist Church Junior Choir of South Jamaica, it has a revivalist fervor that, for me, matches in intensity the highest moments of Aretha’s ‘Amazing Grace’ album. Especially inspired is the spontaneous call-and-response singing between Nina and her brother, Sam Waymon. Pieces of Nelson’s poem weave in and out of the musical fabric, culminating in passages of speech-song delivered with a compressed rage that is almost unbearably painful to hear: “No matter how much you try/You can’t get close to nobody no more/Because today is a killer/And only you can save us Lord.”
Her interpretation of “Isn’t It a Pity” is deeper, darker and even more compelling. Nina paces the song slowly, concentrating on the words to communicate her cosmic exasperation in the most dramatic way imaginable; they are uttered phrase by phrase, and underscored with great rolling piano chords that build and subside with each emotional transmutation. In the hands of a lesser artist, this would be sheer desecration, but precisely because her subject is desecration, and because her profound musical intuition is as intact as ever, she carries off her conception with complete success. When she sings a line like, “Some things take so lon—ng,” her voice almost cracking with passion, the full meaning of the words is driven home with an historical resonance you will not likely forget. After the line, “we are all the same,” Nina spits out her interpretation: “We are all guilty.” The song’s climactic summation has Nina singing: “Maybe some day at least I’ll see me/And just concentrate on givin’…givin’…givin’…givin’,” her voice rising to a howl of anguish. The cut ends as Nina simply moans, “My God,” implying a crisis and probably rejection of religious faith.
This is the voice of experience itself, the voice of conscience lamenting the insane dark side of our collective will. Today, more than ever, Nina Simone’s art comes directly from the cutting edge of reality, where love, rage and despair are inseparable, and there is no other choice but action. Undoubtedly her greatest record, Emergency Ward! is devastating personal testimony of what it’s like to live on that cutting edge with no illusions of escape.