Breeze driftin’ on by

“Feeling Good” wasn’t written for Nina Simone. It’s show music — Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse wrote it for the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. Simone recorded it in New York in January 1965, months before the show even reached Broadway, and by the time it did, the song was already hers.

In the musical the number belongs to a Black character who has just beaten the show’s white “hero” at his own game — which explains why a lyric this plainspoken carries so much charge. Simone needed none of it explained. On her version, arranged by Hal Mooney for the album I Put a Spell on You, she opens completely alone: no piano, no rhythm section, just her voice counting off birds, sun, and breeze like someone taking inventory of a world newly owned. Then the horns crash in.

That entrance is the whole event. Play it loud enough that the brass actually startles you — “it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day” deserves nothing less.