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

Reference

  1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3660176. Ruth Feldstein. 1 March 2005. Journal of American History. Retrieved January 20, 2021.
  2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/jay-z-a-speech-by-sen-robert-f-kennedy-and-schoolhouse-rock-among-recordings-deemed-classics-by-library-of-congress/2019/03/19/f7eb08ea-4a58-11e9-9663-00ac73f49662_story.html?. Travis M. Andrews. 20 March 2019. The Washington Post. Retrieved January 20, 2021.
  3. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/movies/nina-simones-time-is-now-again.html. Salamishah Tillet. 19 June 2015. The New York Times. Retrieved January 20, 2021.