Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam was released in 1964 from the album ‘Nina Simone in Concert’ and would later be known as her “First civil rights song” (Feldstein, 2013, p.84) This essay will critically evaluate Nina Simone’s contribution to the civil-rights movement, assess cultural themes of ‘Mississippi Goddam’ including race and gender, and question whether Nina Simone was a positive activist who sought equality with her protest songs or only bread hate through the promotion of violence in her career.
‘Mississippi Goddam’ was written in 1963 in an hour following the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham where 4 young black girls were killed. (Staggs, 2013) Although it is in-keeping with Nina Simone’s stylistic fusion of jazz, classical and blues, this song seemed to take on a more dramatic tone than previous work as Simone uses its changing dynamics to highlight the theatricality of the performance, moving between whispers, silence, screams and cries, as discussed by Richard Elliot (2013, p.53). The song’s lyrics, full of anger and despair, challenged cultural norms of the 1960s such as racism and misogyny in a way that was much more raw and direct than previous protest songs that used subtle metaphors to address the topics such as Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ released in 1939 and The Impressions’ ‘Keep on Pushing’ released in 1964. This was apparent
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You’re all gonna die and die like flies”. Dick Gregory said, “What she was doing was different. All the suffering that black folk went through and not one said, ‘Mississippi Goddam’. We all