The young Eunice Waymon wasn't just in attendance at these dramatic scenes as a kid-she was the piano player, hired at age 10 because of her obvious genius at the piano. Luke's, was the kind of church where people would sometimes fall on the floor convulsing during a revival, trying to expel the devil from their sinful bodies. Her mother, Kate Waymon, was an impassioned believer and minister who wanted to help draw sinful souls out of the darkness and into the light, and her church, St. It's easy to trace the roots of the song to Nina Simone's days as Eunice Waymon, a musical prodigy growing up in small-town North Carolina in the 1930s and 1940s. But as we follow Nina Simone up to the rock, down to the river, and all up and down the piano keys, what are we breaking through to? Listening to it is an experience, and the song fills you with a vibrating feeling of descent followed by a noisy breakthrough. What is 'Sinnerman'? Is it blues, gospel, jazz, or classical? Is it a song about one woman's experience of breaking through and finding Jesus, or a song condemning a whole society for its sins? What does Nina Simone mean when she sings about the Biblical, otherworldly images of a bleeding river, or a boiling sea? One thing that is obvious about 'Sinnerman' is that the song defies categorization. Despite its length and consummate strangeness, 'Sinnerman' has been one of her most popular (and most sampled) tunes over the years. By the time the song reaches a climax, Simone is pretty much howling like a wolf, and the mike picks up the sounds of her breathing heavily. The Pastel Blues liner notes describe the song as 'Nina magnificently catching the hysteria of a soul lost.' The song is a ten-minute descent into a personal world that feels like it is falling apart, and falling fast.

The intensity that Nina Simone brought to this interview is the same intensity she brought to the long studio session that produced 1965's 'Sinnerman.' Her biographer, Nadine Cohodas, calls 'Sinnerman' a 'frantic plea for absolution' ( Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone, 173). I loved it! Folks would be shoutin' all over the place.

'I'd be playiNnNnNnNnNnNng, boy! I'd really be playing. 'Some of my most fantastic experiences-experiences that really shake me, now that I think of them-happened in the church when we'd have these revival meetings,' Nina Simone told Ebony in 1969.

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