Where it really comes from

Feeling Good

Not a Nina Simone original — a 1964 stage show tune

Almost everyone takes ‘Feeling Good’ for a Nina Simone original, but Simone’s 1965 recording is a cover. The song was written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the 1964 stage musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd, and first performed by Cy Grant on the show’s opening night. Simone recorded her version months later and made it so completely her own that the stage origin all but vanished.

The record

Where it comes from

Original
Introduced by Cy Grant, 1964
Written by
Anthony Newley & Leslie Bricusse
First performed
3 August 1964, Theatre Royal, Nottingham — a stage musical
Made famous by
Nina Simone, 1965

How we traced it

The song was written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for their 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd Wikipedia ↗.

Cy Grant was the first to perform it, introducing the number on the UK tour’s opening night in Nottingham on 3 August 1964; he later cut his own version for the 1965 album Cy & I. The point is simply that the song is a show tune, not a Simone composition Cy Grant ↗.

Nina Simone recorded her version in January 1965 for I Put a Spell on You, released that June on Philips, and it became so definitive that most listeners now assume she wrote it — the stage origin, and Cy Grant, largely forgotten the musical ↗.

Wikipedia — the song's history and its many covers
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Fact-check

The attribution problem

This is the cleanest kind of music misattribution: nothing about Nina Simone’s record is wrong or fake. The only error is believing she originated it — a 1965 cover mistaken for the source, when the source is a 1964 stage musical.

The beliefcover, not original

‘It’s a Nina Simone song’

Simone’s 1965 version is a cover. The song was written a year earlier for a stage musical and first performed by Cy Grant the history ↗.

The originwritten for the stage

A 1964 Newley & Bricusse show tune

It was written for The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd and premiered on the UK tour in August 1964 the musical ↗.

The first performersang it first

Cy Grant, 1964

Grant introduced the song on stage, the earliest performance on record; who cut the very first commercial recording is less clear, but the song plainly predates Simone by a year.

Written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for a 1964 musical, first performed by Cy Grant, and made famous — but not originated — by Nina Simone in 1965 the record ↗.

Context

Why the cover ate the original

Show tunes are unusually prone to this: the stage origin is invisible to radio listeners, who only ever meet the song through a recording. Nina Simone’s arrived early and arrived huge, so it simply became the version, with nothing in the popular memory to displace it.

The irony is that the writers were no obscurity — Newley and Bricusse were a hit theatre-and-film team — yet the song is remembered as Simone’s alone. Each later revival, by Muse in 2001 and Michael Bublé in 2005, only detached it further from a 1964 London stage almost nobody now connects it to.

The song, in order
  • Newley and Bricusse write ‘Feeling Good’ for The Roar of the Greasepaint (1964).
  • Cy Grant first performs it on stage, 3 August 1964, on the UK tour.
  • Nina Simone records her version, January 1965; released June 1965 on Philips.
  • Simone’s reading becomes definitive, and the stage origin fades from memory.
  • Muse (2001) and Michael Bublé (2005) revive it for new audiences.
A 1964 show tune, introduced on a London stage — remembered as a song Nina Simone wrote.

The original performer

Cy Grant

1919–2010 · Guyanese-British singer and actor

Cy Grant (1919–2010) was a Guyanese-British singer and actor who, in 1964, became the first person to perform ‘Feeling Good’, singing it in The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. He recorded his own version on the 1965 album Cy & I. It is a quiet irony of pop history that he introduced one of the most-covered songs of the era, and almost nobody remembers it was his to introduce.

Popularly credited as the original

Nina Simone

1933–2003 · American singer, pianist and songwriter

Nina Simone (1933–2003) recorded ‘Feeling Good’ in January 1965 for I Put a Spell on You, and her version so completely redefined the song that it is now hers in the public mind. Her reading is genuinely hers and genuinely great; the only error is chronological, the assumption that a song this identified with her must have started with her. It started a year earlier, on a London stage.

The songwriters

Anthony Newley & Leslie Bricusse

British songwriting partnership · wrote the 1964 musical

Anthony Newley (1931–1999) and Leslie Bricusse (1931–2021) were a British songwriting team who wrote ‘Feeling Good’ for their 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint. The same partnership wrote ‘Pure Imagination’ and ‘The Candy Man’ for Willy Wonka and the theme to Goldfinger. They are the figures the song’s fame obscures most: not the famous singer, but the writers whose show tune became a standard.