Mississipi Goddam (1964)

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Mississippi Goddam" is a song written and performed by American singer and pianist Nina Simone, who later announced the anthem to be her "first civil rights song". The song was released on her album Nina Simone in Concert in 1964, which was based on recordings of three concerts she gave at Carnegie Hall earlier that year. The album was her first release for the Dutch label Philips Records and is indicative of the more political turn her recorded music took during this period.[1]

Simone composed "Mississippi Goddam" in less than an hour. Together with the songs "Ain't Got No, I Got Life", "Four Women" and "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", it is one of her most famous protest songs and self-written compositions. In 2019, "Mississippi Goddam" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[2]

Key Lyrics

Picket lines, school boycotts

They try to say it's a communist plot

All I want is equality

For my sister, my brother, my people, and me


Yes, you lied to me all these years

You told me to wash and clean my ears

And talk real fine just like a lady

And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie


Oh but this whole country is full of lies

You're all gonna die and die like flies

I don't trust you any more

You keep on saying "Go slow!"

"Go slow!"

Interpretation

The song captures Simone's response to the racially motivated murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers in Mississippi, and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four black children.[3] On the recording she cynically announces the song as "a show tune, but the show hasn't been written for it yet." The song begins jauntily, with a show tune feel, but demonstrates its political focus early on with its refrain "Alabama's got me so upset, Tennessee's made me lose my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi goddam."

Reception

Simone first performed the song at the Village Gate nightclub in Greenwich Village, and shortly thereafter in March 1964 at Carnegie Hall, in front of a mostly white audience. The Carnegie Hall recording was subsequently released as a single and became an anthem during the Civil Rights Movement.[4]

“Mississippi Goddam” was banned in several Southern states. Boxes of promotional singles sent to radio stations around the country were returned with each record broken neatly in half.[5]

Simone also performed the song in front of 10,000 people at the end of the Selma to Montgomery marches when she and other black activists, including Sammy Davis Jr., James Baldwin and Harry Belafonte crossed police lines.[6]

Reference

  1. "I Don't Trust You Anymore": Nina Simone, Culture, and Black Activism in the 1960s. Ruth Feldstein. 1 March 2005. Journal of American History. Retrieved January 20, 2021.
  2. Jay-Z, a speech by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Schoolhouse Rock among recordings deemed classics by Library of Congress. Travis M. Andrews. 20 March 2019. The Washington Post. Retrieved January 20, 2021.
  3. Nina Simone’s Time Is Now, Again. Salamishah Tillet. 19 June 2015. The New York Times. Retrieved January 20, 2021.
  4. A Raised Voice: How Nina Simone turned the movement into music.. Claudia Roth Pierpont. 11 August 2014. The New Yorker. Retrieved January 20, 2021.
  5. What Happened to Nina Simone?. Adam Chandler. 27 June 2015. The Atlantic. Retrieved January 20, 2021.
  6. The Almost Forgotten Selma March. Gary May. 20 March 2015. The Daily Beast. Retrieved January 20, 2021.