I've posted this here before, so forgive me if I repeat myself.
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I did once go to see Nina Simone do a free concert in the depths of Brooklyn at a baseball field back in the mid 80s. It hadn't been publicized very much, so the audience was mostly residents of the neighborhood, with only a few Manhattanites in the crowd. But it was packed, shoulder to shoulder, on a hot July night.
I will never forget the hushed response to Simone's slow angry rendition of Pirate Jenny. The audience had probably never heard of Brecht and Weill or Lotte Lenya or The Threepenny Opera. They just heard Nina singing about a girl who was "scrubbing the floors" and dreaming about killing all the "gentlemen" in the town, deciding whether to "kill them now or later," then leaving on the black freighter, looking nice with a ribbon in her hair.
It was chilling--and the most Brechtian rendition of that song I could imagine.
