Nina Simone always felt underappreciated during her lifetime. She had a right to. After 1960, her albums never put more than a dent in the lower end of the pop charts. And her singles made no greater impression. More, the press, the industry and even some audiences found her uncompromising performances and adamant character either off-putting or baffling.

Thankfully, time has a way of correcting such perceptions. Over the last three years, there’s been an escalating appreciation not only of Nina Simone’s depth of talent, but of her defiant character. Attention for her work has been greatly amplified by Liz Garbus’s unflinching 2015 documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, as well as her richly deserved induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year.

Today, another step in her reassessment takes place. Simone’s childhood home has been named a national treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Fewer than 100 homes in the US have earned that designation. The organization, joined by the World Monuments Fund and other groups, plans to turn the now vacant and dilapidated property, located in Tryon, North Carolina, into a salute to the artist’s legacy. Today a series of events will occur around the house where Nina Simone taught herself to play piano, and where she grew up experiencing the severe restrictions of the Jim Crow south. To honor those events, there’s a deep catalogue of Simone’s work available to savor on every streaming service.

Nina Simone’s house. Photograph: Nancy Pierce

Between 1958 and 1993, the singer, who died in 2003 at 70, released more than 60 live and studio albums, mainly containing cover versions of other people’s songs. Yet, the arrangements Simone created, informed by her classical training, and the phrasing of her vocals, drawn from jazz, rewrote the compositions in her own image. Some recordings, like her cover of Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne, differ so radically from the original, she deserved a co-writing credit.

Some of the pieces Simone composed herself became classics, including her blunt response to the violence of the civil rights era south in Mississippi Goddam, and the pride anthem To Be Young, Gifted and Black.

Over the years, Simone’s politics became increasingly radical. By the late 60s, she had no trouble asking black audiences if they were “ready to kill” for the cause – a quote captured in Garbus’s movie. Small wonder, Simone later became a kind of godmother to gangsta rap’s hardest artists.

Her work took just as unblinking a view of gender. With her deep pitch, she blurred expectations for male and female singers, providing a role model for later androgynous vocalists from Jeff Buckley to Anohni. Likewise, Simone’s recordings ignored divisions between jazz, pop, rock, classical music and soul.

Classical piano formed Nina Simone’s musical foundation. Originally, she didn’t even want to sing. She only began to, in the 1950s, because the nightclub owners she met wouldn’t book a woman who wasn’t a vocalist. The singing style she developed showed an incredible range, marked by fierce inflections and edgy enunciations. She turned each of her covers into a comment on the song as much as an embodiment of it. In her greatest performances, she obliterated the line between what she was feeling and what she could convey, gracing listeners with a direct channel to her soul.

10 of Nina Simone’s most defining tracks

1. Suzanne

Simone performed a gut-renovation on Leonard Cohen’s classic song. She structured the music as a series of prickly, ascending piano figures, lending each line the urgency of a question that can’t be answered.

2. Mississippi Goddam

Simone composed this piece as her outraged response to the bloodshed in the south in the 60s. She banged down hard on her piano, as if pummeling injustice with every riff.

3. I Loves You Porgy

Simone’s 1959 cover of the song from the musical Porgy and Bess resulted in her sole top 20 pop hit. Unlike many artists, who buffed the music with a theatrical sheen, Simone brought out something far earthier and erotic in the song.

4. The Other Woman

Simone’s take on The Other Woman – one of the most painful songs about infidelity ever penned – inspired Jeff Buckley’s sublime reading. But where his version emphasized rejection, hers puts the accent on the revenge found in the final verse.

5. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood

Riveting takes on this anthem of regret abound, from the Animals’ to Joe Cocker’s wrenching version. In Simone’s version, she sounds remorseful but also cynical about ever receiving full redemption.

6. Feeling Good

The sass of this standard could easily have descended into crass Las Vegas camp. But Simone inhabits the song’s joy with a confidence that makes it not just sexy but liberating.

7. Do What You Gotta Do

Jimmy Webb’s admission of thwarted love requires whoever sings it to convey abject vulnerability. While many Simone performances express unshakable resolve, here she showed an equal understanding of defeat.

8. In Love In Vain

In one of her most erudite recordings, Simone opens with an elaborate classical piano figure, followed by a vocal that unfurls the full breadth of her range. The final vocal arc may be the most virtuosic of her career.

9. I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free

Simone’s take on this civil rights anthem has both a political, and a personal, resonance. Though the lyric suits the singer’s many songs of social awareness, it also speaks to the inner demons she faced in her lifelong battle with manic depression.

10. Who Knows Where the Time Goes

Simone slowed down Sandy Denny’s existential ode to a near standstill, the better to revel in its depths. Her transcendant reading captures both the limits of mortality and mysteries of the spirit.