Ledisi’s Paying Tribute

“I first heard Nina sometime in 2003,” Ledisi, 49, recently recalled “I was on my rocking chair on my porch in East Oakland, and I was depressed. This was after I recorded two albums, but I had bills, just got divorced, hated the area, and felt like I was not growing. So I decided, ‘OK. This is the day. I’m going to leave this earth.’”

As she sat contemplating her death, a song on the radio interrupted: Simone’s version of “Trouble in Mind.”

“It jumped me out of my skin,” Ledisi said enthusiastically, while imitating Simone’s hands on the piano and quoting the lyrics she sang: “Trouble in mind, I’m blue/But I won’t be blue always/’Cause the sun is gonna shine/In my backdoor some day.” Ledisi said she “just cried and cried, and as the song kept playing, I started feeling better.” She knew she was going to survive that day. “That’s when Nina and I really met.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/arts/music/ledisi-nina-simone.html