The Story Behind The Song: Nina Simone’s anger in ‘Mississippi Goddam’
Those suffering under oppression demand to be heard. A statement as true today as it ever was. There may be more methods of mass communication than ever, but historically, the most direct way for marginalized voices to have their two cents was through art. This is partially because the best way of getting anti-establishment sentiments through to the establishment’s attention is to do so with something so beautiful it cannot be denied. However, it’s also because creation can vent the anger one feels at the state of the world. Nina Simone found this anger within herself on one of the darkest days of America’s 20th century.
On September 15th, 1963, the white supremacist terrorist group the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. This event, described by Dr Martin Luther King Jr as “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity,” was national news, and when Simone heard about it, her first thought wasn’t to create art.
“At first, I tried to make myself a gun. I gathered some materials. I was going to take one of them out, and I didn’t care who it was,” Simone said, understandably. “Then Andy, my husband at the time, said to me, ‘Nina, you can’t kill anyone. You are a musician. Do what you do.’ When I sat down, the whole song happened. I never stopped writing until the thing was finished.”
One can almost hear this within the song itself. This is a song that has no time for metaphor; it is a piece that expresses itself the way that Simone may have expressed herself to anyone she talked to at the time. “Alabama’s gotten me so upset / Tennessee made me lose my rest / And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.” This is a song whose grief, panic and sheer, blazing anger is only deepened by the incongruously peppy backing, putting paid to Simone’s claim on the record that “this is a show tune, for a show that hasn’t been written yet.”
The targets of her initial reaction may have been the subhuman scum who perpetrated the attack, but the targets of ‘Mississippi Goddam’ are broader. After all, oppression isn’t just perpetrated by those committing the attacks. It’s also perpetrated by systems of power who respond to people living in fear for their lives with “Sure, but what about everyone else’s feelings?” Simone rages against them on the track too: “Me and my people just about due / I’ve been there so I know / They keep on saying ‘Go slow!’”
The haunting refrain of ‘Go Slow!’ punctuates the two chorus’. The first details just how much Black Americans have been relied upon for their labour for, in economic terms and historical credit, absolutely nothing: “But that’s just the trouble / Washing the windows / Picking the cotton / You’re just plain rotten / You’re too damn lazy / The thinking’s crazy.” The second concerns liberal governments’ tendency to make a cursory gesture towards protecting their most threatened people, then demand gratitude for that while also reminding the very people threatened that they’re going to take their sweet time in doing so.
Powerfully outlining, “But that’s just the trouble / Desegregation / Mass participation / Reunification / Do things gradually / But bring more tragedy”. In her article ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free: Nina Simone and the Redefining of the Freedom Song of the 1960s’, ethnomusicologist Dr Tammy Kernodle wrote this chillingly prescient analysis: “In ‘Mississippi Goddam’, we have Nina Simone pulling from the past and invoking it in the present, but also speaking to what is yet to come if America does not enact real social change.”
Thus, we have the story of the song: systems of power prioritising the feelings of a protected few over those genuinely at risk. By the end of the song, Simone is singing, “You don’t have to live next to me / Just give me my equality.” Half a century later, the song, from top to bottom, remains the same. Maybe that information can cause folks to stop hoping for change and start acting for it.
