Review
Genre and Mood
Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” is jazz, soul and blues at once: a spiritual about judgment played as a ten-minute chase, intense from its first bars.
Song Summary
The song follows a sinner trying to hide from divine justice on Judgment Day, only to hear the rock cry out that there is no hiding place. Simone learned it as a child at the revival meetings where her mother, a Methodist minister, used it to make people confess. On Pastel Blues the credit reads simply “arranged by Nina Simone”, and her arrangement stretches it past ten minutes.
Musical Breakdown
Intro: The Chase Begins
Shmoop hears the opening as a frenetic hi-hat beat under a piano figure that repeats like a freight train barrelling into a tunnel, with the guitar echoing the piano’s fast lines.
Verses: Nowhere to Run
Simone’s voice cuts above the noise. uDiscover Music hears a pulsing drum, a rock-and-roll guitar, plinking piano and rhythmic clapping.
Call and Response: Power
About two minutes in, Shmoop notes, Simone begins calling out “Power” over and over in a gospel manner, answered by a quiet chorus. uDiscover places the first great release nearly four minutes in.
Breakdown: Hands and Rhythm
Then the piano drops out. Guitar, bass and drums carry on alone, and handclaps enter, scattered at first, then more frequent as the piano finds its way back.
Climax: Voice and Piano as One
Piano and voice merge into a second crescendo that rises and falls; Simone begins to moan.
Outro: The Sudden Stop
Shmoop hears a last breakthrough near the nine-and-a-half-minute mark, sustained by the piano for almost another minute. Then the song simply stops.
Concepts in Focus
The Power section is call and response in its oldest sense: a leader calls, a congregation answers, as at her mother’s revival meetings.
The stripped-down passage is a breakdown before dance music named it: the piano falls away, rhythm and claps hold the tension, and its return lands harder. No wonder house producers return to this record, as in Nina Simone – Sinnerman (Felix Da Housecat’s Heavenly House Mix).
“Sinnerman” is also a lesson in the cover version. Les Baxter’s orchestra recorded it in 1956 with Will Holt singing, and the Weavers reshaped it in 1959. Simone’s arrangement eclipsed them, and later covers such as Belako – Sinnerman are covers of hers.
Artistic Context
Simone was a Juilliard-trained classical pianist, and in her Greenwich Village years she often closed her concerts with this song. Pastel Blues, recorded in New York with Al Schackman and Rudy Stevenson on guitar, Lisle Atkinson on double bass and Bobby Hamilton on drums, came out on Philips on 1 October 1965, the year of Malcolm X’s assassination and the Selma-to-Montgomery march, where Simone performed.
Impact and Reception
AllMusic called “Sinnerman” a frantic, explosive tour de force that dwarfs everything else on the album, and Pitchfork ranked Pastel Blues 21st among the best albums of the 1960s. It has been sampled for Talib Kweli’s Get By and Hozier’s Nina Cried Power and scored the gallery theft in The Thomas Crown Affair. Set aside ten minutes and let it chase you.
