Mississippi Goddam

"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".[1] 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.

"Mississippi Goddam"
The sleeve for the promo release of the single
Song by Nina Simone
from the album Nina Simone in Concert
Released1964
RecordedNew York City, live at Carnegie Hall
LabelPhilips Records
Songwriter(s)Nina Simone
Composer(s)Nina Simone
Producer(s)Hal Mooney

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]

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." In the song, she says: "They keep on sayin' 'go slow' ... to do things gradually would bring more tragedy. Why don't you see it? Why don't you feel it? I don't know, I don't know. You don't have to live next to me, just give me my equality!"

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.[4] The Carnegie Hall recording was subsequently released as a single and became an anthem during the Civil Rights Movement.[5] "Mississippi Goddam" was banned in several Southern states.[6] Boxes of promotional singles sent to radio stations around the country were returned with each record broken neatly in half.[7]

Simone 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.[8]

Simone’s performed “Mississippi Goddam” on The Steve Allen Show on September 10, 1964. First Amendment scholar Ronald Collins has pointed out that Allen, the “famed host of a nationally syndicated TV variety program… was one of the few who then dared to provide a forum for those with dissident views.” Therefore, when Nina Simone “joined Allen at the desk before [the] song, he told her he wanted her to sing ‘Mississippi Goddam’ because he knew it would provoke a lively discussion about censorship.”

See also

References
  1. Feldstein, Ruth (March 1, 2005). ""I Don't Trust You Anymore": Nina Simone, Culture, and Black Activism in the 1960s". Journal of American History. 91 (4): 1349–1379. doi:10.2307/3660176. JSTOR 3660176 – via ignacio.
  2. Andrews, Travis M. (March 20, 2019). "Jay-Z, a speech by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and 'Schoolhouse Rock!' among recordings deemed classics by Library of Congress". The Washington Post. Retrieved March 25, 2019.
  3. Tillet, Salamishah (June 19, 2015). "Nina Simone's Time Is Now, Again". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 5, 2015.
  4. Pierpont, Claudia Roth (August 11, 2014). "A raised voice: How Nina Simone turned the movement into music". The New Yorker. Retrieved July 5, 2015.
  5. Nina Simone Reveals 'Mississippi Goddam' Song 'Hurt My Career'. Jet. Johnson Publishing Company. March 24, 1986. p. 54.
  6. Smith, Ian K. (March 25, 2010). "Top 20 Political Songs: Mississippi Goddam – Nina Simone – 1964". New Statesman.
  7. Chandler, Adam (June 27, 2015). "How the Civil-Rights Era Made and Broke Nina Simone". The Atlantic. Retrieved July 5, 2015.
  8. May, Gary (March 20, 2015). "The Almost Forgotten Selma March". The Daily Beast. Retrieved July 5, 2015.
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