The Story Of Goose Covering Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’

When Nina Simone recorded “Sinnerman” in 1965, she was recording a song that she had been listening to for years. It would often become her show-closing highlight.

Sixty years later, when Goose plays “Sinnerman,” they’re most definitely covering Nina Simone’s version, but the song’s history goes back much further than that.

Where You Gonna Run To?

“Sinnerman” was already old when Simone recorded it. Its roots reach into African American spirituals. The song is about a terrified sinner discovering on Judgment Day that there is nowhere left to run: He runs to the rock, he runs to the sea, he turns toward the Lord. Every way out towards redemption closes before him.

Simone knew that story long before she became Nina Simone.

Born Eunice Waymon in North Carolina, she was a gifted pianist who initially dreamed of becoming a classical concert performer. The career that followed, however, would become impossible to categorize. Eventually known as the “High Priestess of Soul,” Simone moved freely between classical music, jazz, blues, gospel, folk and pop, often pulling several of them into the same performance.

She never let genre define what she could do.

That’s also part of what makes “Sinnerman” such a natural fit for Goose. They come from radically different eras and musical worlds, but they share an instinct that sits at the heart of Flight Path: music doesn’t have to stay in the box someone else put it in.

A spiritual can become jazz, blues, gospel and eventually something approaching a 10-minute trance. Decades later, that same song can find its way to an improvisational rock band playing a casino arena in the Connecticut woods and become something else all over again.

Simone’s mother, Mary Kate Waymon, was a Methodist minister, and Simone remembered hearing “Sinnerman” at revival meetings as a child. Years later, after classical training, she began playing nightclubs, secretly at first, even adopting the name Nina Simone so her deeply religious mother wouldn’t discover that Eunice Waymon was performing what she considered the “Devil’s Music.” Out of that background of church music, classical music and the nightclub performances came the beginnings of her unclassifiable career. And Simone brought “Sinnerman” with her to Greenwich Village, where it often became a way to end her performances. It was less a finale, it has been said, than an exorcism.

There is even a surviving link between the revival meetings of Simone’s childhood and the version that would eventually close Pastel Blues. She performed “Sinnerman” at New York’s Village Gate in 1961. The recording was left off the original 1962 live album but surfaced decades later as a bonus track. By the time Simone entered the studio for Pastel Blues, this was already a song she had been performing live on stage.

Following “Sinnerman” backwards from here is also interesting. Simone wasn’t the beginning.

The song’s roots stretch back much further. Pieces of its language can be heard in earlier African American spirituals, including “No Hiding Place Down Here,” recorded in 1928. A much closer ancestor arrived with The Sensational Nightingales’ “On The Judgement Day” in 1954, followed two years later by Les Baxter and folk singer Will Holt’s three-minute “Sinner Man.” The Swan Silvertones took it up. So did The Weavers. Words and arrangements shifted along the way, as songs passed from singer to singer tend to do. Similar, really, to the game of musical telephone that eventually carried an old Scottish ballad called “The Bonnie Lass O’ Fyvie” into the Grateful Dead songbook as “Peggy-O.”

All On That Day

Recorded during the sessions for Pastel Blues, Simone’s “Sinnerman” runs more than 10 minutes, an extraordinary length for a studio recording in 1965. For that matter, still a pretty extraordinary amount of real estate to give a single track on an album today. Piano and percussion establish a relentless pulse. Simone repeats the old verses while the band keeps pushing underneath her, gradually building the song into something almost hypnotic.

And then come the handclaps!

Simple and mesmerizing, they fall into the rhythm and somehow ratchet the tension even higher. It’s almost scary sounding. By then, Simone isn’t simply singing about someone desperately searching for somewhere to hide. The piano races, the percussion churns, the hands keep clapping and the entire recording begins to sound like the running itself.

The recording closed Pastel Blues and became the song’s definitive modern interpretation. For many listeners, Simone didn’t merely record the song. Her version became so definitive that it effectively transformed a traditional spiritual into a Nina Simone song for generations of listeners.

If Goose is what brought you here, this is one of those wonderful detours Flight Path is meant to encourage: don’t stop with “Sinnerman.” Listen to Pastel Blues. The album is a gem, moving effortlessly through blues, jazz, folk and spirituals. “Sinnerman” is its enormous closing statement (just like her live shows), but hearing what comes before it makes that finale even more rewarding.

I Run To The Rock

“Sinnerman,” meanwhile, kept moving.

Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer sang a ska version with The Wailers in 1966. Tosh continued reshaping the song until the sinner became the “downpressor,” the oppressor who discovers judgment is coming for him, eventually recording “Downpressor Man” for his 1977 album Equal Rights. Sinéad O’Connor later followed that branch of the song’s family tree on her 2005 reggae album Throw Down Your Arms.

Others returned more directly to Simone. 16 Horsepower brought “Sinnerman” into the dark Americana of Folklore in 2002. A year later, Felix da Housecat used Simone’s recording for a house remix on Verve Remixed 2, demonstrating just how naturally the piano, percussion and relentless momentum of that 1965 performance could find a home on a dance floor nearly four decades later.

Simone’s recording itself never disappeared. It surfaced repeatedly in movies and television, including The Thomas Crown Affair, Miami Vice and Sherlock, while samples found their way into hip-hop and other genres.

Power

By the time Goose reached “Sinnerman,” the song had accumulated more than half a century of additional history.

But Goose’s path leads unmistakably back to Simone.

Simone spent a career ignoring the borders between musical genres. Goose has built much of its own identity doing the same. And in “Sinnerman,” they found a song practically designed for what they tend to thrive on: one with a sturdy frame but plenty of room to take it somewhere else.

Goose’s version retains the same rhythm that makes Simone’s recording so recognizable while exploiting something else she had already demonstrated: this didn’t have to be a three-minute song. Repetition was part of the charm. The groove could keep circling while tension accumulated around it. It’s really the perfect example of a classic Goose jam that builds towards a peak. So for the band, “Sinnerman” was practically a gold-plated invitation.

Goose recorded “Sinnerman” before they ever played it live.

In late 2021, Secretly Canadian, one of the most respected independent record labels in the indie-rock and alternative music world, was celebrating its 25th anniversary with SC25, an anniversary campaign that included a series of 25 new singles benefiting New Hope for Families in the label’s hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. Goose was asked to participate and contributed a seven-minute studio version of “Sinnerman,” initially released through Bandcamp around Giving Tuesday before receiving a wider release on December 3 of that year to streaming services. New Hope For Families houses and supports homeless families locally in Bloomington.

The choice wasn’t arbitrary. Rick Mitarotonda explained at the time that Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” had been an inspiration for years and that Goose had already been wanting to play it. The SC25 project provided the perfect opportunity.

That makes the recording particularly interesting in hindsight. Before the jams, before the bust-outs, before “Sinnerman” started occupying 18 or 19 minutes of a Goose set, there was this comparatively compact studio version, seven minutes of the band figuring out what they heard inside Simone’s song.

Then they took it onstage.

On February 26, 2022, at Goosemas at Mohegan Sun, Goose finally gave “Sinnerman” its live debut. At nearly 10 minutes, that first live version remained relatively close to the dimensions of Simone’s recording. But Goose was already leaning into the electronic possibilities hidden inside.

At first, “Sinnerman” was mostly exciting because Goose was playing “Sinnerman.”

Then the recordings start revealing what else the band heard in it.

Dallas that October offered an early glimpse. Deep in the second set, Goose dropped it into a wonderful sequence: “Echo Of A Rose” > “Sinnerman,” followed by “Madhuvan” > “Born to Be Wild” > “Echo Of A Rose” > “Madhuvan.” “Sinnerman” wasn’t treated like a museum piece cover that needed to be carefully introduced and played on its own. Goose threw it straight into the middle of the action.

After a May 2023 performance in New Orleans, it disappeared for a bit.

When it returned at SPAC on September 7, 2024, Goose played “Sinnerman” for the first time since May 2023. Coming out of “Drive,” the opening rhythm slowly revealed what was happening. After roughly 16 months away, the song wasn’t simply another cover turning up in the setlist anymore. It was a bust-out.

Two months later in Cincinnati, they again explored the song’s improvisational possibilities. On November 9, “Sinnerman” approached 15 minutes during a second set that featured impressive segues out of “Jeff Engborg” and into “Into The Myst.” The familiar pulse was still there as Goose continued exploring the song’s potential as a jam vehicle.

By 2025, the question was no longer whether Goose would play “Sinnerman,” but what might happen when they did.

In Grand Rapids on February 15, the song emerged from “Tumble” and began slipping toward the electronic side of Goose’s improv and closed the second set ferociously. Peter Anspach’s keyboards and synth took the song deeper into electronic territory while the rhythm section kept it driving forward. The old spiritual had become something remarkably contemporary: dark, pulsing and still driven by that familiar urge to run that Simone’s recording conveyed.

Keep Moving

At CMAC on June 21, Goose stretched “Sinnerman” to more than 18 minutes. Positioned between “Dripfield” and “Big Modern!,” it no longer felt like a cover with some extra improvisation attached. The jam had become part of the reason to play the song.

Richmond on October 2 demonstrated that those jams didn’t all have to lead to the same place. Goose patiently moved through darker electronic passages, with Peter working the Rhodes and the band manipulating the intensity rather than simply racing toward a peak. Eventually the familiar four-on-the-floor pulse reappeared, almost like finding the trail again after wandering away from it.

By the time Goose reached Viva El Gonzo on May 8, 2026, all of those ideas seemed to be converging. Peter’s electronic layers swirled around a rhythm section locked into a pounding, propulsive pocket, allowing the 18-minute performance to move between dance music and open improvisation without completely severing its connection to Simone.

A song about a sinner desperately searching for somewhere to hide had become a vehicle for modern jam-band improvisation. But listen closely and the distance between the two isn’t really that far. The hypnotic mechanism was there in 1965: repetition, tension, rhythm and release. Simone had the racing piano, percussion and those mesmerizing handclaps. Goose has synthesizers, effects and an improvisational rhythm section capable of stretching the same basic idea across nearly 20 minutes.

Where You Gonna Run To Next?

The sinner is still running.

Goose just keeps finding new places for the song to go.