English
SONGFABLE · 1965

Feeling Good

NINA SIMONE · 1965

Feeling Good - Nina Simone (1965)

TL;DR: "Feeling Good" was born not as a Nina Simone song but as a Broadway show tune written by two white Englishmen in 1964. Simone's 1965 recording transformed a piece of musical-theater optimism into something heavier and stranger — a Black American hymn to liberation that arrived in the same year as Selma and the Voting Rights Act. The horn fanfare, the unaccompanied opening, the way her voice tightens around the word "new" — none of this is decoration. It is the sound of a woman, and a country, daring to imagine a different morning.

The opening four bars that changed everything

Before the orchestra enters, before the famous brass stab, there is just a voice and a held breath. Nina Simone sings the first lines of "Feeling Good" unaccompanied, almost as if she is talking to herself. It is one of the most recognizable openings in twentieth-century popular music — and one of the most deceptive. The song sounds, at first, like contentment. It is, in fact, closer to a quiet act of war.

Recorded for her 1965 Philips album I Put a Spell on You, Simone's version of "Feeling Good" has been streamed billions of times, licensed for car commercials, sampled by Kanye West, covered by everyone from Michael Bublé to Muse. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Simone in 2018; Rolling Stone has repeatedly placed her among the greatest singers of all time. And yet the song's strangest fact is rarely mentioned: she did not write it, did not particularly love the show it came from, and almost certainly understood it differently from the men who put it on paper.

A Broadway flop with a strange afterlife

"Feeling Good" began life inside The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd, a musical by the British songwriting team Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. The two had already scored a hit with Stop the World — I Want to Get Off in 1961, and Bricusse would later co-write the lyrics to "Goldfinger" and the score to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Greasepaint was their follow-up: an allegorical piece about an aristocrat ("Sir") and a tramp ("Cocky") playing a rigged game whose rules the rich man keeps inventing.

The show toured the English provinces in 1964 and opened on Broadway in May 1965. It ran for 232 performances — respectable but not triumphant — and is mostly forgotten today. What survives are two songs: "Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me)" and "Feeling Good," the latter sung in the original production by a Black performer named Cy Grant, in a number where a character called "The Negro" briefly steps into the action to win the game that "Sir" has been rigging against "Cocky."

The racial coding is not subtle. In the show's logic, the song belongs to a character defined entirely by his Blackness, who arrives to demonstrate that the rules can be broken. Bricusse and Newley intended this as a gesture of progressive sympathy — a mid-1960s English liberal's idea of allyship. But the result is that "Feeling Good," before it became a Simone song, was already a song about what liberation might sound like in a Black voice. Simone, who recorded it within a year, simply made the metaphor literal.

What Simone heard that Bricusse and Newley didn't

By 1965, Eunice Kathleen Waymon — born in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, the sixth of eight children of a Methodist minister and a handyman — had been Nina Simone for a decade. She had wanted to be the first Black classical pianist at Carnegie Hall. She had been turned down by the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, a rejection she believed until her death was racially motivated. She had played cocktail piano in Atlantic City to pay the bills, taken a stage name so her mother would not know she was working in bars, and accidentally become a pop star with "I Loves You, Porgy" in 1959.

She had also, by 1965, become radicalized. The 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, which killed four Black girls, pushed her into songwriting as protest. "Mississippi Goddam," her response, was banned in several Southern states. By the time she walked into the studio to cut I Put a Spell on You with arranger Hal Mooney, she was already moving in the orbit of Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Stokely Carmichael.

So when Simone took on a Broadway song about a character called "The Negro" winning a rigged game, she was not interpreting a show tune. She was occupying it. The horn arrangement — those iconic stabs, that swaggering brass fanfare — is Mooney's, but the phrasing is entirely hers. Listen to the way she stretches the imagery of dragonflies and stars and breeze, paraphrasing freedom as a series of small natural things that belong to her. Listen to the slight delay before she names the river, the sky, the day. Each one is being claimed.

The Civil Rights Act had passed less than a year before the recording. The Voting Rights Act would pass that August. Selma to Montgomery happened in March 1965. The song's central image — a new dawn, a new day, a new life — was not a metaphor for personal contentment. It was the language of the movement, rendered as a torch song.

The shape of the recording itself

The technical choices on the 1965 master deserve a closer listen. Producer Hal Mooney and engineer Phil Macy framed Simone in two acoustic worlds. The verses are intimate, almost cabaret — voice forward, brass distant, strings used like punctuation. Then the bridge opens up: the orchestra crashes in, and Simone's voice, which has been smoldering, suddenly bursts into a vibrato wide enough to hear the room.

Pianist that she was, Simone insisted on starting the song without harmonic accompaniment. The risk is enormous. Sing a single line in any key, and the listener has no idea where the song is going; the choice of key becomes audible only when the band arrives. It is the same trick gospel singers use in unaccompanied call-and-response — the moment of "where will she land?" pulls the audience forward. Aretha Franklin would deploy a version of it on "Respect" two years later. Simone got there first.

The arrangement also features a moment that gets overlooked: a small instrumental break midway through where the horns trade phrases with Simone's piano. It lasts maybe twelve seconds. But it is the only time on the recording that she plays as well as sings — a quiet reminder that this was a Curtis-rejected classical prodigy, equally fluent in Bach and Billie Holiday, performing what she considered her real instrument.

Why the song refused to stay put

Within a decade of Simone's recording, "Feeling Good" had escaped its original context entirely. Sammy Davis Jr. recorded it. So did the British acid-jazz band Traffic, in a much-loved 1967 version. George Michael cut it. Bublé made it a Vegas-circuit standard. Muse turned it into stadium rock in 2001. The Pussycat Dolls sampled the Simone original. Kanye West sampled Bobby Womack singing it. By the time the song appeared in a 2010 Volkswagen ad and a 2019 Apple commercial, it had become shorthand for "tasteful confidence."

This commercial afterlife has produced a strange phenomenon: most listeners under thirty encountered "Feeling Good" first as advertising soundtrack and only later, if at all, as a Black liberation song. The song now operates in two registers simultaneously. To a luxury-watch buyer in a 2015 magazine spread, it signals aspirational mood. To anyone who has read Simone's autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1991), it signals something much closer to insurrection.

This is the curse and gift of the great pop record. Songs that mean too much get worn smooth by repetition. But the original recording always remains, and the original recording always tells the truth. The sound of Simone naming the new day is the sound of a woman who, by 1970, would feel so betrayed by America that she would leave it for Barbados, then Liberia, then France, dying in 2003 in Carry-le-Rouet on the Mediterranean coast, never to return.

Why it still hits in 2026

There is a reason "Feeling Good" keeps reappearing in moments of collective unease — appearing on protest playlists, on Spotify's most-streamed jazz tracks, in tribute concerts at Coachella and Glastonbury, in the soundtrack to dance pieces by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The song works because it never resolves the tension between defiance and joy. It is not triumphant. It is not melancholy. It is the sound of someone deciding, against considerable evidence, that the morning might still be theirs.

That posture has become unexpectedly contemporary. In a decade marked by climate anxiety, AI displacement, and the slow grinding of democratic norms, the most resonant emotional register is no longer despair or optimism but something closer to defiant attention — the choice to notice that the river is still there, that the dragonfly still flies. Simone's "Feeling Good" is the patron saint of this mood. It is what hope sounds like when hope has stopped being naive.

It is also, increasingly, a feminist text. Simone was a Black woman demanding the world acknowledge her as a serious musician in a year when Curtis Institute alumni were almost entirely white and male, when the music industry routinely paid Black artists in flat fees rather than royalties, when domestic violence from her then-husband and manager Andrew Stroud was an open secret in the jazz world. The song's claim — that the new day belongs to her — is small only if you have always assumed the day was yours.

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60s defiant jazzsoul freedomidentity nina-simonecivil-rights60s-jazzbroadway-covershow-tuneliberation
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