The case for number eighteen
Nina Simone scores 86 on the lowest Instrument score in the top twenty
Eighteenth on The Cove 100, level on points with Dusty Springfield at nineteen. She holds the weakest instrument and one of five perfect Interpretation scores on the list. This is the entry where the method is doing the most work.
The Cove editorial desk · Published 17 September 2026
Twenty-one for the voice and twenty-five for what she does with it is the widest split in the top twenty. Any ranking that scores singers with a single number either places her far too low, on the instrument, or far too high, on the impact — and cannot explain either. Scoring four things separately is the only way to say what is actually true about her.
Instrument: 21
The lowest in the top twenty, and not a controversial number. The voice is a contralto of limited range, uneven across registers, with a heavy vibrato that she could not always control and a top that was effortful. Judged as raw material against the singers around her, it is the weakest on this part of the list.
What it possesses is authority of timbre. The sound is grave, dark and immediately identifiable, and it carries a weight that has nothing to do with volume. The component scores range, evenness, control and size, and on those it is a 21. Everything that makes her extraordinary is measured elsewhere, which is the point of measuring four things.
Live: 23
Higher than either singer directly around her, and earned in an unusual way. The live recordings show a performer who treated a concert as an unrepeatable event: tempos altered, arrangements abandoned mid-song, spoken passages inserted, material chosen against the room's expectations. The singing is technically less secure than in the studio and more compelling.
She was also a professional-standard pianist accompanying herself, which changes what the component is assessing — the phrasing is anchored to her own playing, and the rhythmic freedom she takes is possible because nobody else has to follow it. Twenty-three rather than higher because consistency across the documented performances is genuinely variable; the ceiling is as high as anything on this list.
Interpretation: 25
Full marks, with Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Amy Winehouse. Her method was to treat a song as an argument rather than a performance: tempo, dynamics and diction were all subordinated to what the lyric was being used to say, and she was willing to make a song less beautiful in order to make it more exact.
The classical training is audible in the structure — she builds a reading the way a pianist builds a movement, with material stated, varied and returned to. Nobody else on this list applies that architecture to popular song so consistently, and it is why her versions of other people's material so often displace the originals.
Influence: 17
Joint-lowest in the top twenty, with Karen Carpenter, and the number this entry least expects readers to accept. The case against it is obvious: her recordings are cited constantly, her arrangements have been sampled and rebuilt for decades, and her standing has grown rather than faded.
The component scores inheritance of the singing by other singers, and that is a narrower test than cultural standing. Very few singers have taken her actual vocal method, because the method is inseparable from the piano, the classical structure and a willingness to sacrifice beauty that most performers will not risk. She is widely revered, extensively sampled and rarely descended from. That is what 17 records, and it is the component most open to challenge on this card.
What 86 means, and why she is above Dusty Springfield
Simone and Springfield both score 86, and this is the least mechanical placing on the list. Simone is ahead by two on Live and one on Interpretation. Springfield is ahead by one on Instrument and two on Influence. Two components each way, and the margins cancel exactly.
It is worth being explicit that no general convention produces this order. The preference applied at twelve and thirteen — that the components measuring what a singer decides carry a tie — does not resolve this pair, because Simone holds the Interpretation advantage and Springfield holds the Influence one, and those are the two components in question. This edition places Simone first on the perfect Interpretation score: a maximum in the component the method treats as the hardest to reach, against an advantage spread across two others. That is an editorial judgement, stated rather than disguised, and a reader who weights demonstrable influence more heavily should place Springfield eighteenth.
Scores follow the published method: four components of twenty-five points each, equally weighted. Nina Simone died in 2003; the performances discussed here are the recorded and broadcast ones, and the assessments are editorial opinion about the singing alone.