Women Are Icons and Heroes Too! Nina Simone is One of the Best

I have only been on medium.com for less than 3 months, and I already have identified some women icons and heroes like Laura Quainoo, Dr. Clare Xanthos, Your Native Friend, and Aza Y. Alam. I look forward to meeting more. Queen Nzinga, Rosa Parks, Mae Jemison, Katherine Johnson and others are heroes and icons who I truly love. With that said, you know how significant Nina Simone is to me, because she tops my list.

I offer “Mississippi Goddam” a song written and performed by Sister Nina, a full-fledged CHOSSA (Children of Stolen and Sold Africans), 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.

Our beautiful sister 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 her most famous protest song, and self-written composition. 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”.

The song captures Sister 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. On the recording she sarcastically 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!”

Our sister 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.

The Carnegie Hall recording was subsequently released as a single and became an anthem during the Civil Rights Movement. “Mississippi Goddam” was banned in several Southern states. Boxes of promotional singles sent to radio stations around the country were returned with each record broken in half. Can you imagine that?

Sister Nina 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 James Baldwin crossed police lines.

In 2022, in response to the decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade scholar Shana Redmond told NPR “I think there’s only a sense of continuity that we can take from its legacy, from its usage in this very moment. The structures to which Nina Simone was responding have continued to face us in the future that she hoped would be free and clear and beautiful. So the rage that she brought to the production of that song, the moment at which she said, ‘I’m either going to take up arms, I’m going to buy a gun, or I’m going to write this song,’ is precisely where so many people see themselves fitting in today.”

In 2021, it was listed at №172 on Rolling Stone’s “Top 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” Obviously I disagree, but that’s because of the difference in cultures. “Mississippi Goddam” is №1 on my Top Protest Songs of the 20th Century. Sung by my heroine Nina Simone, the lyrics to the song follow; but to really understand what my sister had to say, I implore, plead and beg you to listen to the song. It can easily be found on YouTube (gratefully they, and the Internet exist).

“Mississippi Goddam”

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

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Can’t you see it
Can’t you feel it
It’s all in the air
I can’t stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

This is a show tune
But the show hasn’t been written for it, yet

Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day’s gonna be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong there
I’ve even stopped believing in prayer

Don’t tell me
I tell you
Me and my people just about due
I’ve been there so I know
They keep on saying “Go slow!”

But that’s just the trouble
“do it slow”
Washing the windows
“do it slow”
Picking the cotton
“do it slow”
You’re just plain rotten
“do it slow”
You’re too damn lazy
“do it slow”
The thinking’s crazy
“do it slow”
Where am I going
What am I doing
I don’t know
I don’t know

Just try to do your very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

I made you thought I was kiddin’

Picket lines
School boy cots
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!”

But that’s just the trouble
“do it slow”
Desegregation
“do it slow”
Mass participation
“do it slow”
Reunification
“do it slow”
Do things gradually
“do it slow”
But bring more tragedy
“do it slow”
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
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

That’s it!

To demonstrate that there are only “two degrees of separation” in our community, I must mention that Nina Simone was born on February 21, 1933. We are both Pisces, and she was born in 1933, the same year as Minister Louis Farrakhan and Dr. Walter “Bubby” Lomax. Other than my Dad, my brothers have personally had the greatest impact on my life, and I will always be, forever grateful.

If my writing interests you, I hope you will pass it on to the folks who follow you, and also to the folks who you follow. I don’t write for money. My books that offer insight into who I am, and what I am about, including full details for the implementation of Equism, are free at equism.net. Please go to the Tab Links to Books, and click on either one, or both, for you perusal and assessment.

Thanks for your time, patience, and indulgence.

Peace.

I await your response.