Promo copy sleeve, with”Goddam” censored. Courtesy Philips Records (Fair Use).
(Note: Nina Simone’s lyrics & spoken parts are in italics.)
The name of this tune is ‘Mississippi Goddam”
And I mean every word of it
Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam
Around the mid-1990s, I heard a recording of a show broadcasted on WBAI-FM, a legendary, independent radio station in New York City of the Pacifica Network, founded by anti-war activists after World War 2. Its free-form approach as it existed then was a wonder to behold, even the sound quality was a stark contrast to its studio-slick neighbors in the highly competitive middle of the FM radio dial - 99.5, between two major commercial frequencies. (Fun fact: an excerpt of a WBAI segment is sampled on “Lightning Strikes (Not Once but Twice)” on The Clash classic Sandinista! )
What I heard was a program (I no longer remember the title or its hosts) dedicated to the music and legacy of Nina Simone (1933-2003). The retrospective, as best as I can recollect, was likely either for the freedom fighter and jazz chanteuse’s 60th birthday (1993) or the then-30th anniversary of one of the most censored songs of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), “Mississippi Goddam,” released in March 1964.
On the air was the recording of that song at Carnegie Hall in New York, for its debut release on the album Nina Simone in Concert. That was when I first heard this song.
This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.
To say that “Mississippi Goddam” was banned in several Southern US states is an understatement, besides the promo copy spelling “Goddam” as a sequence of comic-derived censorial scrawls. As was noted in the radio special, piles of copies of the release were returned to the label — all apparently broken in half. As a co-host told it, Nina Simone laughed at the spectacle, certainly a sure sign that her song had its intended effect. A protest song calling out the widespread brutality - and murder - of those related even tangentially to the CRM was in turn responded with a widespread act of brutality against culture in dissent.
I bet you thought I was kiddin’, didn’t you?
Musically, the song is based on a simple piano vamp that underscores a powerful dissonance with the lyrics’ somber tone of exhaustion caused by being forced to wait for change while those who oppose are free to spread their fatal violence, even among the innocent, as her resonating voice emphasized the absurdity as well as the criminality of opposition to the CRM. “Mississippi Goddam” was Nina Simone’s response to at least three events of rhe era that reverberate to the present day. First, Emmett Louis Till (aged 14) was kidnapped, mutilated, lynched by gunshot, and thrown into a river in Drew, Mississippi, Second, on June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers, field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in his home state of Mississippi, was assassinated by a Klansman there in Jackson. Third, on September 15, of the same year across the border in Birmingham, Alabama, four young girls — Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Carol Denise McNair (11) — lost their lives when white supremacist terrorists planted a bomb that detonated in 16th Street Baptist Church.
Picket lines, school boycotts
They try to say it’s a communist plot
All I want is equality
For my sisters, my brothers, my people, and me
Lyrically, the underpinning of “Mississippi Goddam” is iNina Simone’s frustration with morally bankrupt liberalism. Her lamentations are supported by a backing male chorus who chant, “Too slow.”
But that's just the trouble (Too slow)
Unification (Too slow)
Do things gradually (Too slow)
But bring more tragedy (Too slow)
Why don't you see it, why don't you feel it
Indeed, “more tragedy” was to come that only further ingrained the dangers of organizing in Mississippi, and a reminder that change was coming “too slow” across the US generally. Late on the evening of June 21, 1964, three months after the release of “Mississippi Goddam” was greeted shockwaves that kept it off many airwaves, Klansmen in the town of Philadelphia in the titular state murdered three Civil Rights workers on a voter registration drive: Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Earl Chaney. One of the bloodthirsty mob after the crime, by the way, called them “agitating outsiders.”
Undoubtedly this was very likely was in Nina Simone’s mind later, when, in 1968, not long after the martyrdom of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she sang “Mississippi Goddam” and interpolated the title line of “Why? (The King of Love is Dead),” written by her bassist Gene Taylor, and spoke the following to the audience, many of whom responded with approving laughter:
I ain’t ‘bout to be nonviolent, honey!
Oh-ho-ho-ho!
Whoa, no!
So why commemorate the life and sacrifice of Dr. King? As she spoke one verse later:
And I loved him because he believed it
He lived by it
Let’s return to the definitive Carnegie Hall recording for the last word on “Mississippi [insert cacographic lines of hiding the truth here].” In case that Nina Simone was too much of the warrior woman she is , she closes out with the following:
You don’t have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi gohhhdaaaam
That’s it!