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LondonLouis
last.fm has brought me back to this great song. Remain very happy with this track.
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LondonLouis
A track like this explains why Nina was so great. She could perfectly deliver light tunes such as "My Baby Just Cares for me", but then she would hit you with a deeply felt, heavy song like "Work Song". When she sings, you know damn well that she's thinking about the Black experience and that it mattered deeply to her. She's an interesting contrast to Holiday. Billie could do the occasional deep song such as "Strange Fruit", but she was never sufficiently in control of her career to pick her songs in any serious way. Nina, in contrast, came from a later generation. Nina was in control of her career and had a highly developed political consciousness. She also had the artistic sensibility to articulate the cries of the time in songs which will last. When Dylan sang "Blowin in the Wind", you could still feel the folk coffee bars behind him. When Nina sings, you tap directly into the Civil Rights movement as experienced by the Afro-American community.
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