Can a show tune become the voice of a generation's freedom? Episode 4 of Coverist follows "Feeling Good" from a London stage to Nina Simone's piano, where it found the meaning it still carries today.
An unfair game
Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse wrote "Feeling Good" for the 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd, a play about life as a game whose rules are rigged against some players. The song is the moment the loser of that game steps outside it for the first time, looks at the sky and breathes. Cy Grant sang it in England, Gilbert Price on Broadway.
America in the sixties
At the same time, America was burning with the civil rights movement: segregation, marches and violence on the evening news. Nina Simone, a pianist who had dreamed of a classical career and believed she was turned away from the Curtis Institute because of her skin colour, was becoming one of the movement's most powerful voices.
The version that changed everything
Simone recorded the song before the musical even opened on Broadway and released it on I Put a Spell on You in 1965. With arranger Hal Mooney she rebuilt it from the ground up: an unaccompanied opening, a slow and heavy groove that walks rather than dances, and a line that in her voice became a declaration: "Freedom is mine."
Birds, sun and breeze
Why does a song that became an anthem of freedom talk about birds, sunshine and rivers? In the episode we read the lyrics and hear how, for someone told all their life that "this game isn't for you", a bird flying without anyone's permission is a revolution in itself.
Covers of Feeling Good
Almost every generation has made its own "Feeling Good". In this episode we play and compare:
- Muse
- Michael Bublé
- Kaz Hawkins
- Avicii feat. Audra Mae
- George Michael
- Joe Bonamassa
- Victory Boyd
- Ben L'Oncle Soul
- Jennifer Hudson