At Nina Simone's childhood home, in search of 'How It Would Feel to Be Free'

In this 250th anniversary year of the United States, pianist Lara Downes is traveling the country collecting conversations with scholars, searching for our history through songs.Her latest is in Tryon, N.C.

to talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Salamishah Tillet about the revered artist who is the subject of her upcoming book. This series of conversations began in a 200-year-old barn in Brattleboro, Vt.and has taken me from Montgomery, Ala.

to Philadelphia and New York City — encounters all meaningfully rooted in place and time.But this visit with Salamishah Tillet to Nina Simone's childhood home in North Carolina brought history viscerally and profoundly alive.The 650-square-foot, three-room clapboard house where Simone was born in 1933 stands as a testament to the relationship of art and history.

The home has been preserved by its owners, visual artists Adam Pendleton, Ellen Gallagher, Julie Mehretu and Rashid Johnson.They lovingly led the restoration in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation's African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.

As Tillet and I sat within the sunlit quiet of its pale blue walls, with birds singing in the magnolia tree outside its windows, I felt suspended between Nina Simone's time and our own — the world she was born into and the world she changed.My conversation with Tillet wound its way to a particular song by Simone: "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free," an anthem of the fearless fight for freedom that has been the essence of the American experiment for 250 years.Simone sought liberation from personal experiences of bigotry, misogyny and violence, from global injustice and intolerance, and from artistic constraints and conventions.

Her courage was true and tested, ignited by ancestral memory, by rage and a conviction that it was her right and responsibility to stand up and speak out."An artist's duty," she said, "is to reflect the times."Tillet's book, Nina Simone and the World She Ma...