Nina Simone / Compact Jazz - Nina Simone
Feeling Good (From "the Roar of the Greasepaint")
triumphant, building from restraint to exultation
Video: Release - Topic on YouTube
A catalog of natural images—birds, rivers, blossoms, stars—builds toward a declaration of liberation and renewal. Simone's arrangement, moving from stark bass to horn-driven swell, turns what was written as a Broadway show tune into something closer to a civil rights anthem of emancipation.
liberation and freedom renewal rebirth through nature emotional catharsis self-possession
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses an unnamed listener directly, repeatedly insisting the listener already understands an emotional state the song only gradually names outright; the tone is confident, almost daring the listener to doubt it.
What happens
The song opens with a sequence of natural images—birds, sun, breeze—each followed by an assertion that the addressee already knows the speaker's feeling, withholding the actual content of that feeling until the chorus names it as newness and goodness. Successive verses add more images (sea, river, blossom; dragonflies, butterflies; stars, pine) escalating in specificity and sensory richness, while the chorus refrain returns each time with mounting conviction, culminating in an explicit claim of freedom before the final restatement of feeling good.
How it's built
Built on a simple verse-refrain-chorus template repeated three times, with a spoken-adjacent bridge (the dragonfly/butterfly section) that breaks the rhyme pattern and shifts address from 'how I feel' to 'what I mean,' signaling a move from sensation to certainty. The lack of a bridge melody change in some arrangements is often filled instead by dynamic escalation—Simone's version leans hard on this, letting orchestration rather than lyric structure carry the song's climax.
Section by section
Opening verses
The song withholds its subject, letting a string of pastoral images imply an emotional state the addressee is told they already recognize. This delay creates suspense and universality at once, since the feeling is never pinned down by name.},{
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated assertion that the listener already knows the speaker's feeling, attached to a new image each time, creates a hypnotic accumulation that substitutes rhythm and repetition for explicit emotional description.
- catalog/list
- The song's verses function as an inventory of natural phenomena—flora, fauna, weather—each item standing in for an unspecified feeling, letting the listener fill in the emotional content through implication rather than statement.
- synecdoche
- Isolated natural details (a breeze, a blossom, a dragonfly) stand in for a total experience of freedom or renewal, letting fragments of the world represent an entire changed existence.
- declarative repetition
- The chorus's insistence on newness, repeated almost identically each time, mimics ritual or incantation, reinforcing the sense of a threshold being crossed rather than merely described.
Reading it
On its face this is a simple song of a person shaking off some private burden and reveling in the sensory world. But its adoption by Simone, given her position as a civil rights figure, invites a reading of the sun and open sky as figures for freedom after captivity or oppression, and the final naming of freedom as a claim of possession earned rather than given. Both readings coexist without contradiction: the song's imagery is broad enough to support both a personal catharsis and a broader liberation narrative, and Simone's phrasing and arrangement choices seem to lean the material toward the latter, whatever its original theatrical context.
Context
The song originated in the 1964 musical 'The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd,' written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse. Nina Simone's 1965 recording is the version most listeners know, and her interpretation—slower build, gospel-and-jazz inflected arrangement, and her own vocal authority—transformed a stage number into a piece closely associated with Black liberation and personal emancipation, a reading reinforced by her broader body of work and activism, though this is an inference about reception rather than a documented authorial intent.
Listen for
- the arrangement's dynamic build from sparse instrumentation to full horn section
- Simone's vocal restraint in early verses versus the openness in later ones
- the shift in phrasing from 'how I feel' to 'what I mean' in the bridge
- the way repetition of the chorus gains weight through orchestration rather than new lyrics
- the single explicit naming of freedom near the song's end
About Nina Simone
Nina Simone was an American composer, concert pianist, singer, songwriter, and civil rights activist. Simone's bearing and stage presence earned her the title the High Priestess of Soul.
1933 - 2003 / United States
Full biography and catalogue