“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” is a song written by Bennie Benjamin, Gloria Caldwell and Sol Marcus for the jazz singer and pianist Nina Simone, who first recorded it in 1964. Nina Simone’s orchestrated downtempo rendition appears on her 1964 album “Broadway-Blues-Ballads”. The beginnings of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” came with composer and arranger Horace Ott, who came up with the melody and chorus lyric line after a temporary falling out with his girlfriend (and wife-to-be), Gloria Caldwell. He then brought it to writing partners Bennie Benjamin and Sol Marcus to complete. However, when it came time for songwriting credits, rules of the time prevented BMI writers (Ott) from officially collaborating with ASCAP members (the other two), so Ott instead listed Caldwell’s name on the credits.
“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” has been covered by many artists, most notably by The Animals, whose blues rock version of the song became a transatlantic hit in 1965.
The Animals’ lead singer Eric Burdon would later say of the song, “It was never considered pop material, but it somehow got passed on to us and we fell in love with it immediately.” In a 2010 interview with Eric Burdon, he said: “I’ve really been misunderstood. By my mom, my dad, school teachers, a couple of the women that I married. I’ve been misunderstood all of my life.”
The Animals sped up the tempo and made prominent use of a guitar and organ riff that was picked out and expanded from an element that originally appeared in the Simone recording’s outro. In Animals concerts at the time, the group maintained the recorded arrangement, but Burdon sometimes slowed the vocal line down to an almost spoken part, recapturing a bit of the Simone flavor.
This single was ranked by Rolling Stone at #322 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
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