Journal of the Society for American Music (2008) Volume 2, Number 3, pp. 295–317.
C 2008 The Society for American Music
doi:10.1017/S1752196308080097
“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”:
Nina Simone and the Redefining of the
Freedom Song of the 1960s
TAMMY L. KERNODLE
Abstract
This article explores the work of pianist/vocalist Nina Simone as the catalyst for a new type of
freedom song in the black freedom movement during the 1960s. It examines the lyrical content
and structure of Simone’s music, which reflects the rhetorical and geographical shift of the
transition from King’s nonviolent, southern-based civil rights movement of the late 1950s to the
mid-1960s to the militant black power nationalist movement of the late 1960s. Curtis Mayfield’s
Chicago soul style is also referenced as marking an important shift in mid-1960s R&B, which
had largely avoided overt political statements.
I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.
I wish I could break all the chains holding me.
I wish I could say all the things that I should say.
Say ’em loud say ’em clear
for the whole wide world to hear.
—Nina Simone1
Over the past thirty years, numerous scholars have written extensively about and
established the importance of the freedom song to the black freedom movement
of the 1960s.2 Although this vast body of literature is sound in its articulation
of the function, scope, and structure of the freedom song of the early 1960s,
little attention has been given to the second generation of freedom songs that
emerged in the mid-1960s and reflected the rhetorical and eventual philosophical
transition of the movement from the nonviolent, interracial, church-based activism
of Martin Luther King Jr. to the black nationalist, black power rhetoric of the
Special thanks given to Sharon Hicks, Emmett Price, and Horace Maxile for reading versions of this
article.
1
“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” originally appeared on Nina Simone, Silk and
Soul, RCA Victor LSP 3837/740506, 1967. It is also included on the compilation The Very Best of Nina
Simone: Sugar in My Bowl, 1967–1972, RCA Victor 07863 67635-2, [1967] 1998.
2
A number of sources have firmly established the importance of music in the civil rights movement. See Kerran L. Sanger, “When the Spirit Says Sing!”: The Role of Freedom Songs in the Civil Rights
Movement (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995); Bradford D. Martin, “Freedom Singers of the Civil
Rights Movement: Delivering a Message on the Front Lines,” in The Theater Is in the Street: Politics and
Public Performance in the Sixties America, 20–48 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004);
T. V. Reed, The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism From the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of
Seattle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Let the Church
Sing ‘Freedom,’ ” Black Music Research Journal 7 (1987): 105–18; Clyde R. Appleton, “Singing in the
Streets of Raleigh, 1963: Some Recollections,” The Black Perspective in Music 3/3 (Autumn 1975):
243–52.
295
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296
Kernodle
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers, and
similar organizations.3 One is left with the impression that the articulation of black
political rhetoric is defined solely in the freedom songs of the early 1960s and
the nationalistic recordings of the late 1960s and early 1970s (i.e., James Brown’s
“I’m Black and I’m Proud,” the Isley Brothers’ “Fight the Power, Part 1”). But in
the interim years of the ideological shift from nonviolence to self-defense, from a
southern, rural-based movement to an urban northern one, music played less of a
role in the coordination of movement activities, yet it did not lose its importance
in articulating the feelings and circumstances that motivated activists. By 1964 a
new body of freedom or protest songs (the terms are used interchangeably) written
by artists such as Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield, James Collier, and others came to
reflect these shifts, serving as documentation of the evolving political identity of
young black America. It is through works such as “Mississippi Goddamn,” “Keep
on Pushing,” and “Burn, Baby, Burn” that one can chronicle the growing anger that
exploded in 1964 and ’65, with rioting in major cities across the country, and in
’66 with Stokely Carmichael’s shouts of “Black Power.” Through analysis of these
compositions, this article will survey the development of the freedom song from its
beginnings as revamped spiritual and gospel song performed in call-and-response
format to a secular individually performed song that reflected the feelings and
aspirations of the larger community. I will also indicate how the early freedom or
protest songs of Simone became the blueprint for subsequent soul and jazz-based
civil rights music, thus bridging two of the most highly identified periods of black
protest music.
Although the music of the black freedom movement is today identified as being
just as significant as the period’s speeches and documentary histories for understanding the rhetoric and scope of the movement, music was not initially a major
element of protest used by activists. The development of a core body of freedom
songs did not occur until the early 1960s. Although gospel hymns were used in
the marches and boycotts of the 1950s and the use of music as protest within the
black community can be documented as far back as the seventeenth century, it
was not viewed as an essential part of the early black freedom movement. Before
1961 activists refrained from singing freedom songs publicly because of fear of
reprisal. But two entities redefined the public use of these songs: SNCC and the
Albany (Georgia) movement. Inspired by the activism of young college students
during the first sit-in on 1 February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, activist
Ella Baker sought a means to fortify the momentum of young activists across
the country. In April 1960 Baker held a conference that brought over two hundred
participants to Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The two-day conference
resulted in the creation of SNCC, which would serve as a student-based arm of the
movement.4 Through sit-ins that desegregated a number of facilities and Freedom
3
For more information on the Black Panthers and the black nationalist movement, see Philip
Sheldon Foner, The Black Panthers Speak (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970); The Black Power Movement:
Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era, ed. Peniel E. Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006).
4
For more information regarding the genesis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
and Ella Baker, see Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic
Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 239–98.
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I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
297
Rides that attempted to desegregate interstate transportation, SNCC and CORE
(Congress on Racial Equality) became the center of the movement’s activity and the
agents that made the singing of freedom songs an important element of movement
strategy. Through the Albany movement of 1961, SNCC redefined the public use
of music. Simple in their construction and initially adapted from spirituals and
gospel songs, the freedom songs became “one of the best records . . . of the transformation of consciousness in the ordinary people, the masses, who took part in the
movement.”5
The public use of freedom songs, as defined by the Albany movement, was
threefold. First, they were used to bridge real or perceived cultural gaps between
southern blacks and middle-class activists. Since singing had remained an important
facet of the work and social lives of rural blacks, the act of singing on one’s porch
served as an important method in building relationships between activists and the
rural black constituency. Second, freedom songs conveyed key values and tactics of
the movement in verses that progressed from freedom in its most abstract form (i.e.,
calls for equality) to specific assertions about measures that would be used to achieve
it (i.e., Freedom Rides, sit-ins, wade-ins, going to jail). Finally, the performance of
freedom songs became one of the ways in which grassroots leaders such as Fannie
Lou Hamer emerged. Although Hamer became an identifiable representative of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that challenged the Democratic convention
for recognition in 1964, she was also identified as one of the movement’s strongest
song leaders.
The freedom songs of the early 1960s fell into two general categories: professionally composed topical songs that commented on protest events from a sideline
perspective and group participation songs that were adapted from spirituals or
gospel songs with some textural modifications. In the latter case, personal pronouns
were altered from first person singular to first person plural. Furthermore, these
songs adopted traits of abolitionist and social gospel hymnody through the use of
collective language, which fostered a sense of community. Within these songs the
“we” had a personal bearing that reflected the notion that when the group overcame
so did the individual. But the importance of these songs did not rest solely in their
use in movement activities. In time they became central in communicating, to those
outside of the rural South, what activists faced in their pursuit of freedom. The use
of freedom songs in this capacity reflected the growing interest and participation of
the folk music community in the black freedom movement and the rise of singing
ensembles from within local campaigns. The formation of the SNCC Freedom
Singers was central to this phenomenon. Organized by Cordell Reagon in 1962,
the Freedom Singers’ main objective was to capitalize on the national recognition
garnered by the music of the Albany movement. They carried the story of the student
movement to the North and to non-black audiences during the peak years of the
southern movement. Because SNCC believed that the press intentionally distorted
the meaning of the movement, the Freedom Singers sought alternative ways to
present what was occurring in the South. For them music was the instrument that
5
Reagon, quoted in Reed, The Art of Protest, 14.
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Kernodle
298
would change public perceptions. Mixing spoken dialogue with freedom songs, the
group illustrated for their audiences the struggles civil rights workers endured. The
aggregation debuted on 11 November 1962 in a concert with Pete Seeger.6 Over
the next four years the Freedom Singers’ relationship with the folk music scene
did much to further the scope and form of freedom songs. Songwriters such as
Bob Dylan, Len Chandler, Phil Ochs, and others began to treat movement themes
topically in their songs and devoted their music and services to further several campaigns. Dylan’s “Oxford Town” told the story of James Meredith’s enrollment at the
University of Mississippi, and “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “The Lonesome
Death of Hattie Carroll” documented the deaths of civil rights worker Medgar Evers
and a poor black woman at the hands of a wealthy socialite, respectively. Chandler’s
“The Time of the Tiger” foreshadowed the spirit of black militancy that would
blossom in the mid-1960s. Seeger, Theodore Bikel, Joan Baez, Chandler, and Peter,
Paul and Mary, would go to the South throughout the early 1960s to draw attention
to the scare tactics being used against activists, sing at meetings and freedom schools,
and perform benefit concerts to raise money for various organizations.7 The folk
movement’s participation in freedom movement activities hit its zenith in July 1963
when Seeger organized a folk festival in Greenwood, Mississippi. The interracial
group of performers that performed for the SNCC-sponsored event garnered a
substantial national audience through television coverage and an extensive writeup in the New York Times. Despite the festival’s success, it would prove to be the folk
movement’s swan song as the onslaught of Beatlemania and Dylan’s abandonment
of his role as political spokesman in 1965 sent the genre into a fight for its own survival. Nevertheless, the freedom song had become central in developing northern,
largely white audiences’ understanding of the black freedom movement.
However, by the mid-1960s several significant events would become key to
rhetorical transitions and factional divisions within the civil rights movement.8
In the months following the March on Washington in 1963, southern backlash and
opposition grew to new and more violent levels. Evers was killed in his driveway in
front of his wife and children, and four young girls sitting in their Sunday School
class at the 16th Street Baptist Church, the spiritual heart of the local movement
in Birmingham, were killed when the church was bombed the morning of Sunday,
15 September 1963. The following summer SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Summer project, a voter registration drive in Mississippi, was rocked when workers
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner disappeared after being
detained and later released by the local sheriff. They would eventually be found
6
Martin, “Freedom Singers of the Civil Rights Movement,” 38–39.
For more information regarding the folk community participation in movement activities see
ibid., 38–44; Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Dick Weissman, Which Side Are You On? An Inside
History of the Folk Music Revival in America (New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2006);
and Pete Seeger, Bob Reiser, Guy Carawan, and Candie Carawan, Everybody Says Freedom (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1989).
8
For further discussion of the relationship between the civil rights movement and the black
power movement, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2002), 60–109.
7
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I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
299
buried in a quarry not far from where they had gone earlier to investigate the burning of a local church in Philadelphia, Mississippi.9 That same summer members of
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an alternative to the state’s whites-only
Democratic Party, consisting of several local representatives including Fannie Lou
Hamer, attended the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey,
seeking recognition as a delegation. Their efforts were undermined by right-wing
delegates, President Lyndon Johnson, and concessions made by high-ranking black
leaders such as Dr. King, Roy Wilkins, and Bayard Rustin. The backdoor deals that
King and other veteran leaders made with the administration cost these leaders the
respect of the young activists, who felt they had taken more physical risks than their
older counterparts. This further polarized SNCC and CORE from King’s movement
and inspired the gradual shift to the black nationalist rhetoric of Malcolm X. In the
months following the 1964 convention SNCC splintered into two groups—those
who wanted the group to become more disciplined (hard-liners) and those who
wanted it to remain loose, informal, and familial (floaters).10 In time the hardliners would assume control over the organization and some of the veteran workers
distanced themselves from the movement. They were replaced by a new group that
advocated self-defense and empowerment rather than integration. By 1966 the new
vision of SNCC was articulated for the world by Carmichael, who had begun popularizing the slogan “Black Power” during the Meredith March in Selma. Overnight,
the group seemingly took on a different mission and complexion, with nationalist
views pushing many of the groups’ white members out and Carmichael and others
looking toward the rhetoric of Malcolm X as their new governing ideology. It would
mark the secularization of the black freedom movement. With SNCC and CORE’s
move to more nationalistic and militant views the function of freedom songs within
the movement and their lyrical content and context changed. At the center of this
musical shift was singer-songwriter and pianist Nina Simone, though in time, soul
performer Curtis Mayfield and folksinger James Collier would also contribute to
the freedom song’s new political consciousness and sound.
Everybody Knows About Mississippi—Goddamn!
Although Nina Simone had established herself as one of pop music’s influential
voices by 1963, her recorded material had crossed several genre distinctions and
included everything from interpretations of spirituals like “Wade in the Water,”
operatic selections like “I Loves You Porgy,” and folk songs like “Black Is the Color
of My True Love’s Hair.” But the escalating violence directed toward activists in
the South and a close friendship with playwright Lorraine Hansberry and other
politically minded actors and writers drew Simone into new political circles. The
9
For more information about the civil rights movement, death of Evers, and the Mississippi
Summer Freedom Project see Adam Nossiter, Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar
Evers (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994); Townsend Davis, Weary Feet, Rested Souls: A Guided
History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); and Voices of Freedom: An Oral
History of the Civil Rights Movement from 1950s through the 1980s, ed. Henry Hampton and Steve
Fayer (New York: Bantam Books, 1990).
10
Ransby, Ella Baker, 342.
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300
Kernodle
impact of these interactions was reflected in her music first in 1963. Over the
next seven years, from 1963 to 1970, Simone would write and perform some of
the mid-1960s’ most explicit protest music, outside of the topical songs written
by songwriters such as Matthew Jones, Carlton Reese, and others. Simone, born
Eunice Waymon in Tyron, North Carolina, grew to fame in the 1950s playing the
nightclubs and bars in Atlantic City and accompanying dancers and voice students
in Philadelphia. After circulating in the nightclub scene in Philadelphia and New
York, she translated her popularity with live audiences, who had made her an
underground cult sensation, to recording success with the Bethlehem label. Her
transition to the mainstream popular music scene was completed in 1959 with the
release of the album “Little Girl Blue” and a concert at New York’s Town Hall.
Despite accolades and acclaim from audiences and critics Simone initially viewed
her career in popular music as a poor substitution for a career in classical music.11
Nevertheless, by 1964 her eclectic musical style, performances on the infamous
chitlin’ circuit, and jazz festivals throughout the United States had brought her
mainstream popularity. “The New York press went crazy over me,” she later wrote
in her autobiography. “Suddenly I was the hot new thing.”12
Simone’s expansive musical style and desire not to be categorized as an artist lured
her to the musical and intellectual community of New York’s Greenwich Village.
Critics started to talk about what sort of music I was playing and tried to find a neat
slot to file it away in. It was difficult for them because I was playing popular songs in a
classical style with a classical piano technique influenced by cocktail jazz. On top of that I
included spirituals and children’s songs in my performances and those sorts of songs were
automatically identified with the folk movement. So saying what sort of music I played
gave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there, but it
also meant I was appreciated across the board—by jazz, folk, pop and blues fans as well as
admirers of classical music. They finally ended up describing me as a ‘jazz-and-somethingelse singer.’ . . .
If I had to be called something it should have been a folk singer because there was more folk
and blues than jazz in my playing.13
Two Village nightclubs were at the center of the evolution of Simone’s musical and
political identity during the late 1950s and early 1960s. They were the Village Gate
and the Bitter End. As one of the centers of avant-garde jazz in New York during
the 1960s, the Village Gate hosted not only the genre’s cutting-edge performers but
nightly drew audiences that consisted of writers such as James Baldwin, Langston
Hughes, and Hansberry, and activists such as LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri
Baraka) and Dick Gregory. Audiences with these individuals would greatly influence
Simone’s political consciousness, particularly her close friendship with Hansberry,
who inspired the pianist to become actively involved with the freedom movement
and use her music to advance the cause.
11
Simone initially wanted to be a concert pianist. Despite her talent and the support of her
community and family, she was denied admission to the Curtis Institute. See Nina Simone with
Stephen Cleary, I Put A Spell On You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone (New York: Da Capo Press,
1991), 66–67.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid., 68–69.
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I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
301
The Bitter End would prove more significant in the development of Simone’s
protest music. Located across the street from the Village Gate, the Bitter End was
considered the “Mother Church” of the folk movement by early 1960s, drawing
nightly performances by artists such as Baez, Odetta, Chandler, and Dylan.14 There
Simone found the formula that would define her freedom songs over the next five
years—create songs that reflected the artist’s true identity, keep them as simple
as possible musically, and write texts that were real in their presentation of world
events. Whereas the protest music of the folk movement remained largely defined
in a left-wing context, Simone’s songs blended the aesthetic beliefs of the Black
Arts Movement with the rhetoric of Malcolm X and the emerging black nationalist
movement.
Simone’s transition from jazz chanteuse to the “voice of the movement” first
manifested in 1963 following the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in
Birmingham. Although she had followed the increased activism of the southern
black community since Rosa Parks’s arrest and the subsequent bus boycott in 1955,
she had not seriously considered the personal implications of the fight for equality.
“The Waymon way,” she later recounted, “was to turn away from prejudice and
live your life as best you could, as if acknowledging the existence of racism was
in itself a kind of defeat.”15 But through the example of Parks and Montgomery’s
larger black community, she came to understand “for the first time the power of
collective action.”16 The warrantless act of terrorism that resulted in the deaths of
four young girls sitting in their Sunday School class spurred Simone to no longer
remain an observer of the struggle. She began to use her popularity with crossover
audiences to convey the feelings that white southern backlash against the movement
was birthing within segments of the larger black community.
I sat struck dumb in my own den like St. Paul on the road to Damascus; all the truths that I
had denied to myself for so long rose up and slapped my face. The bombing of the little girls
in Alabama and the murder of Medgar Evers were like the final pieces of a jigsaw that made
no sense until you had fitted the whole thing together. I suddenly realized what it was to be
black in America in 1963, but it wasn’t an intellectual connection of the type Lorraine had
been repeating to me over and over—it came as a rush of fury, hatred and determination.
In church language, the Truth entered into me and I ‘came through.’ ”17
Searching for an outlet for her anger, Simone went to the piano and in an hour wrote
“Mississippi Goddamn,” her first protest song. The song was not a subtle reading
of the struggle for freedom veiled in Christian-based lyrics of transcendence, such
as the freedom songs popularized at mass meetings or by ensembles like the SNCC
Freedom Singers, Selma Freedom Choir, Nashville Quartet, or other artistic factions
that arose within the larger movement.“Mississippi Goddamn” addressed explicitly
a number of political and ideological issues that had emerged out of the movement’s
14
Paul Colby and Martin Fitzpatrick, The Bitter End: Hanging Out at America’s Nightclub (New
York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), xiii.
15
Simone, I Put a Spell on You, 86.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid., 89.
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Kernodle
302
activities. Four major themes emerged in the lyrics: 1) explicit articulation of the
anger and hatred that was bubbling under the surface in northern cities and younger
segments of the freedom movement; 2) a growing sense of secularism; 3) a turn from
the rhetoric of nonviolence, both of which were becoming increasingly evident in
SNCC by 1963; and 4) the mythology of assimilation and politics of respectability
that had defined black middle-class life since the late nineteenth century. Like
John’s apocalyptic visions in the Book of Revelation, the lyrics also predicted a
day of reckoning for the racist states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, and
detractors of desegregation. But beyond the narrative of the lyrics, “Mississippi
Goddamn” was unique in its musical structure and form. Moving away from
the call-and-response, a capella gospel-tinged performances of the more popular
freedom songs, “Mississippi Goddamn” took on the structure and form of an
up-tempo show tune, with piano, bass, and drum accompaniment. As with other
freedom songs the focus of the performance was Simone’s voice, which transitioned
from her singing plainly the first phrase of text to an almost screaming exclamation
of the famous line “everyone knows about ‘Mississippi goddamn!’ ” The song was
simple, utilizing a loosely constructed AABA, 32-bar form that was centered on the
refrain “Alabama’s got me so upset. Tennessee made me lose my rest and everybody
knows about Mississippi goddamn!” Simone’s performance of this refrain framed
the song’s two main verses and bridge section, which seems programmatic in its
structure as it fluctuated to reflect contextual changes in the text. A textural and
melodic outline of the song reads as follows:
Refrain (C major)
(A) Alabama’s got me so upset. Tennessee made me lose my rest and everybody knows about
Mississippi goddamn! (2x)
(B) 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.
(A) Alabama’s got me so upset. Tennessee made me lose my rest and everybody knows about
Mississippi goddamn!
Modulation to A minor
(A ) Hound dogs on my trail, school children sittin’ in jails. Black cat crossed my path. I
think everyday’s going to be my last.
(A ) God 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 even stopped believing in prayer.
(B) Don’t tell me. I’ll tell you. Me and my people are just about due. I’ve been there so I
know. They keep on saying—Go slow.
Bridge section: Free in melodic and textual form; serves as transition back to refrain
and C major.
But that’s just trouble (go slow). Washing the windows (go slow)
Picking the cotton (go slow). You’re just plain rotten (go slow)
You’re too damn lazy (go slow). Thinking crazy (go slow)
Where am I going? What am I doing? I don’t know, I don’t know
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I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
303
(A ) Completes the chorus of AABA and marks the return to the home key.
Just try to do your very best. Stand up, be counted with all the rest because everybody knows
about Mississippi goddamn.
Returns to A minor and the same structure as above.
Picket lines, school boycotts, they try and say it’s a communist plot. All I want is equality,
my sista, my brother, my people and me.
You lied to me all these years. You told me to wash and clean my ears. Talk real fine just like
a lady and you’d stop calling me Sista Sadie.
This whole country is full of lies. You’re going to die and die like flies. I don’t trust you
anymore. You keep on saying go slow. Go slow.
Bridge section: Same as above.
But that’s just the trouble (go slow)
Deep segregation (go slow)
Mass participation (go slow)
Beautification (go slow)
Do things gradually will bring more tragedy. Why don’t you see it? Why don’t you feel it?
I don’t know. I don’t know.
Modulation back to home key of C major.
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 goddamn.
The song begins in C major in an up-tempo 4/4 that is established by the
drummer playing each beat, the bassist playing double octave stops, and Simone’s
piano vamping on the main harmonies. The instruments maintain this supporting
role, common to other freedom songs, allowing Simone’s voice to be the complete
focus of the performance. The vamping is stopped only to emphasize “goddamn,”
which is followed by punctuating chords. The song focuses on a few harmonies per
verse, but Simone makes a significant modulation to the relative minor (a minor) as
the text shifts in focus to specifics that framed movement activities such as “hound
dogs on my trail, school children sittin’ in jail.” The bridge section uses the calland-response aesthetic of the mass meetings with the band members responding
to Simone’s exclamations with “go slow.” Brian Ward refers to the song as “the
closest rhythm and blues got in the early 1960s to Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter
from Birmingham Jail,’ the famous 1963 epistle in which the imprisoned civil rights
leader confronted the criticisms of some white clergymen that he was irresponsibly
seeking too much racial change too quickly.”18
But Ward’s interpretation of Simone’s music as R&B is not correct, as the pianist’s
style at the time was far from the sound of black popular music in the early 1960s.
The chart-dominating sounds of Stax, Atlantic, and Motown were a synthesis
of gospel, doo-wop, jazz, and pop, and had come to define the sound of a new
18
Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 301.
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Kernodle
304
generation through the expression of universality of experience. The R&B released
by these labels avoided lyrics that spoke of equality or political perspectives. Rather,
they focused musically on drawing dancers to the dance floor. Simone’s sound, a
synthesis of jazz and folk styles, was largely ignored by pop and black radio. Despite
the fact that her music would be closely associated with the freedom movement as
the 1960s progressed, she never achieved the type of widespread popularity that her
counterparts (e.g., Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin) did.
Simone’s ingenuity as a songwriter is revealed in “Mississippi Goddamn” in setting a highly emotional and angry text as an up-tempo popular song. By stretching
beyond the general form associated with freedom or protest music, Simone attracted
listeners who were not expecting the upbeat style of her musical accompaniment to
be coupled with such explicit lyrics. This is most evident in listening to the version
that appears on the In Concert album. Simone introduces the tune to the audience
by stating “the name of this song is ‘Mississippi Goddamn’ and I mean every word
of it.” The audience responds with laughter, which disappears as the song progresses
and Simone continues to dialogue with the audience between verses. Although the
recorded response at the conclusion of the song is loud applause, it is clear that the
song’s impact was unforgettable. She debuted the song at the Village Gate, and it
“brought the place down.”19 Philips, the label Simone was signed to at the time,
recorded the tune and released it first as a single and later on the album In Concert.
The song was not marketed in the South. Some southern distributors viewed the
use of the word “goddamn” as profane and used this as justification for not selling
it. Others simply did not agree with the song’s message and communicated that in
a variety of ways. In one instance a dealer in South Carolina sent a whole crate of
the records back to the recording company with each one snapped in half.20 Some
radio stations went as far as bleeping out “goddamn” and changing the wording
on the album sleeve, but it did not stop the song from growing in popularity. The
song became a staple in Simone’s nightly performances at the Village Gate and
much like Billie Holiday decades earlier with her performances of “Strange Fruit”
at Café Society, “Mississippi Goddamn” became the one song people came to hear
Simone sing. Robert Guillaume recounts the popularity of “Mississippi Goddamn”
as follows:
Those were the golden years of Nina Simone, for whom the Gate was a second home. Lit
by the light of a single spot, seated at the grand piano, she cut a striking figure, elegant
and proud. Night after night, I’d wait for her to sing “Mississippi Goddamn.” Everybody
knows about Mississippi—goddamn! She’d bellow as the audiences went wild. I’ve never
seen protest rendered so dramatically.21
Vocalist Abbey Lincoln, who had made her political statements with the recording
We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (1960), asserted: “To really understand the 1960s, you
had to hear Nina. And you would have, if you’d lived then. . . . Well I guess it depends
19
Simone, I Put a Spell on You, 90.
Ibid.
21
Robert Guillaume, quoted in liner notes to Four Women: The Nina Simone Philips Recordings,
Verve 440 065 021-2, 2003.
20
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I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
305
what corner you were on, you know.”22 According to SNCC member Stanley Wise,
the song became the anthem of the summer of 1964. “Everybody in the Movement
just sort of took that as a tribute to the Mississippi Summer Project,” he recalled.23
In 1991, Simone wrote in her autobiography that “Mississippi Goddamn” erupted
out of her quicker than she could write it down, and that upon its completion she
knew that she would dedicate herself to the struggle of black justice, freedom, and
equality in the law for “as long as it took. Until all our battles were won.”24
“Mississippi Goddamn,” in structure and text content, was unlike any of the
freedom songs that accompanied the movement’s activities at the time. Texturally
the song moved beyond being a documentary of movement activities and served
more as a political manifesto set to music. The release of “Mississippi Goddamn” not
only marked the awakening of Simone’s political beliefs but symbolized the breaking
of her musical inhibitions. Later Simone would say “until songs like ‘Mississippi
Goddamn’ just burst out of me I had musical problems as well. How can you take
the memory of a man like Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a
half minutes and a simple tune? That was the musical side of it I shied away from.
I didn’t like ‘protest music’ because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative it
stripped the dignity away from the people that it was trying to celebrate.”25
In Concert included another protest song—“Ol’ Jim Crow.” Like “Mississippi
Goddamn,” “Ol’ Jim Crow” was a militant, hard-line statement against the growing
resistance against activists and the rising tide of desegregation. The song moved
away from the Broadway-inspired sound of “Mississippi Goddamn” to reveal a
swinging jazz tune in the hard bop vein. Simone’s piano was once again supported
by bassist Lisle Atkinson, drummer Bobby Hamilton, and guitarist Rudy Stevenson,
but her voice and the performance takes on a strikingly different approach than
that displayed in “Mississippi Goddamn.” The anger that defined the latter was
tempered into a more laid-back, soulful style of delivery. The structure of the
piece allowed Simone to stretch out vocally and in her piano playing in a way that
“Mississippi Goddamn” had not. Unlike “Mississippi Goddamn,” “Ol’ Jim Crow”
concretely connected the mainstream jazz style (i.e., hard bop) with the civil rights
movement, which Sonny Rollins’s Freedom Suite (1958) and Max Roach’s We Insist!
Freedom Now Suite had failed to do.26 The release of the In Concert album and
Simone’s work to raise funds for SNCC would mark the beginning of a six-year
period of protest music that reflected the changing ideologies of SNCC and other
factions of the movement.
In Concert also marked a modification in Simone’s concert repertoire. In addition
to folk songs and Broadway tunes, protest music became an important facet of her
live performances. “I stopped singing love songs,” she stated. “Because protest songs
22
Abbey Lincoln, quoted in liner notes to Four Women.
Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 301.
24
Simone, I Put a Spell on You, 90.
25
Ibid.
26
A number of jazz performers wrote compositions that reflected their connection with the
movement. However, most failed to attract any major attention with jazz and non-jazz audiences.
23
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306
Kernodle
were needed.”27 In the protest songs that followed “Mississippi Goddamn” and “Ol’
Jim Crow,” Simone documented not only the spatial migration of the movement,
but bridged the ideological and generational gaps that had developed between King
(and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Council) and the studentled SNCC during the mid-1960s. By 1965 many within the freedom movement had
come to similar revelations. Some SNCC members had begun stockpiling weapons
and expressing the benefits of what they called “armed self-defense.” By the end of
1965 most of the group’s white members would be expelled and the new leaders
would rhetorically align themselves with the armed anticolonial movements of the
Third World. The time of nonviolence and loving your oppressor was over for
younger segments of the movement. But most important is the role these shifting
philosophies would play in changing the function of music within the movement.
As SNCC member Julius Lester wrote in 1965, the movement was quickly shifting
away from the practices that had defined the early 1960s.
Now it is over. America has had chance after chance to show what it really meant “that
all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights.” America has had precious chances in
this decade to make it come true. Now it is over—the days of singing freedom songs and
the days of combating bullets and billy clubs with love. “We Shall Overcome” (and we have
overcome our blindness) sounds old, out-dated and can enter the pantheon of the greats
along with the IWW songs and the union songs. . . . The people are too busy getting ready
to fight to bother with singing anymore. And as for love? That’s always been better done in
bed than on the picket line and marches. Love is fragile and gentle and seeks a like response.
They used to sing “I Love Everybody” as they ducked bricks and bottles. Now they sing “Too
much love, too much love, nothing kills a nigger like too much love.”28
Simone’s successive freedom songs became the embodiment of these beliefs and
served as a strong link connecting the different militant factions developing across
the country. With King’s focus shifting away from a southern-based movement to
the issues of de facto segregation in the North both cultural and generational gaps
were created. Carmichael, one of the SNCC leaders instrumental in the split from
King’s rhetoric of nonviolence, declared that Simone was “the true singer of the
civil rights movement,” and though other prominent black performers distanced
themselves from the group, Simone openly acknowledged her relationship with
SNCC and on several occasions headlined fund-raisers for it.29 Like many of the
early activists Simone felt that nonviolence had been successful in winning early
battles against segregation, but the escalated violence that the Freedom Rides and
Mississippi Freedom Summer Project had inspired led her to believe that such
methods would not always be successful. “I knew a time might come where we
would have to fight for what was right, and I had no problem with that: the Ku
Klux Klan weren’t non-violent, and neither were the police nor the government if
they felt threatened.”30 It has been recounted in a number of sources that nothing
27
Simone, quoted in Arthur Taylor, “Nina Simone,” Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews (New York: Da Capo Press, [1977] 1993), 150.
28
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Songs of the Freedom Movement, comp. Guy Carawan (New
York: Oak Publications, 1968), 221.
29
Simone, I Put a Spell On You, 98.
30
Ibid., 94–95.
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I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
307
made SNCC workers forget their nonviolent training more than the theft [by other
SNCC members] of their books and Nina Simone records.31 Whereas Simone’s
music was popular with those involved with the movement, it failed to find any
widespread popularity with black or white audiences. Jazz, blues, and folk audiences
acknowledged and publicly proclaimed the merits and artistry of her music, but pop
and R&B audiences largely avoided her non-R&B sound. Black audiences, especially
youth audiences, during the 1960s defined their identity in the emerging R&B styles
and not in the jazz and blues of the World War II generation. With the integration
of black R&B styles into the mainstream a consciousness about the movement and
the political struggles of black America were noticeably absent.32 In the case of
Motown, Gordy sought to distance the music produced by the label from overt
political statements in order not to offend white record buyers. Despite this, many
took Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” as a call to riot. Atlantic
Records would later produce Franklin’s version of Otis Redding’s “Respect,” which
would become one of the anthems of black America.33 Therefore Simone’s music
represented one of the first manifestations of a black popular music that reflected
a lack of self-consciousness, with its focus on a free, African-centered performance
style and lyrics that expressed the experiences of the larger community. LeRoi Jones
referred to this type of music in his seminal work Black Music as “unity music,” that
is, “black music which is jazz and blues, religious and secular, which is New Thing
[avant-garde jazz] and Rhythm and Blues. The consciousness of social reevaluation
and rise, a social spiritualism.”34 But Simone would not be the only musician to
redefine the structure and lyrical context of the freedom song and the consciousness
of black popular music.
Keep On Pushing: Music and the Northern Movement
As the movement headed northward in 1966 not only did Mississippi and other
southern states move from its focal point, but the songs that had accompanied
the boycotts, sit-ins, wade-ins, and marches shifted from their place of importance.
Simone continued to be one of the influential voices of the movement, but new songs
that mirrored the northern urban experience, which was more defined by gospelinfluenced soul music, began to document the movement’s activities. While Dylan,
Seeger, and many other folk singers no longer made the movement their musical
focal point, black folksingers like Collier and Chandler continued to document
the movement in song. These folk songs were patterned after the type of explicit
pronunciations of change first presented in “Mississippi Goddamn.” Songs like
31
Ibid, 95.
For further discussion, see Ward, Just My Soul Responding.
33
For more information on Motown and Berry Gordy’s avoidance of the civil rights movement,
see Gerald Posner, Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power (New York: Random House, [2002] 2005);
Craig Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America (New York: Plume, 1999);
and Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture (New
York: Routledge, 1999).
34
LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” in Black Music
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 210.
32
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Kernodle
308
Collier’s “Burn, Baby, Burn” and Chandler’s “The Movement’s Moving On” sought
to capture the brewing anger in the form of riots that was spawned by the growing
backlash King faced in the North during the end of the northern movement.
Mississippi was taken out of the headlines in July [1964], however, when Harlem held its
own Summer Project to protest the murder of a 13-year old boy by a policeman. Summer
Projects, northern style, usually involve filling a Coke bottle with gasoline, stuffing a rag
down the neck and lighting it. Things go better with Coke! Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant,
Rochester, and Chicago sent Coke after Coke after Coke that summer with the granddaddy
of them all, Watts, to come the following summer.35
The Chicago movement found its voice in the songs of Collier, who worked with
King as an organizer. As vividly as songwriters like Matthew Jones had been in
documenting the sights, sounds, and experiences of the southern movement, Collier
did the same in expressing what black life was like in the slums of Chicago. The
song “Lead Poison on the Wall” discussed the danger of poor children eating the
lead paint used in many South side tenements. Collier explained the inspiration for
the song as follows:
Little children who are hungry all the time will chew on anything, so they’ve been eating
paint that chipped off their walls. We found out about thirty kids died last year in Chicago
from eating lead-based paint. Other children lost their eyesight or suffered brain damage.
We got a group of teenagers together—kids from off the block—and they began to cover
the community, taking urine samples to spot danger in time and distributing information
about lead poisoning. Then with rallies we made it a public issue. Eventually Mayor Daley
put three hundred people to work in the community on the problem, using war on poverty
money. Earlier when this plan had been proposed, it was turned down.36
The lyrics of “Lead Poison on the Wall” were as follows:
Lead poison on the wall, kills little guys and little dolls. It kills them big and it kills them
small. While we stand by and watch them fall, and the landlord does nothing to stop it all.
That death on the wall . . . death on the wall.
There’s poison in the paint, enough to make a little child faint. Enough to blind his eyes.
Enough to make him die, from the lead poison on the wall. Kills little guys and little dolls.
Kills them big and it kills them small. While we stand by and watch them fall, and the
landlord does nothing to stop it all. That death on the walls.37
“Rent Strike Blues” addressed other issues associated with life in the tenements
like rat and roach infestations with exclamations of “everybody black and white
’titled to a decent place to stay. Going on a rent strike, got to end these blues.”38 By
the mid-1960s R&B was moving away from its aversion to political themes and came
to represent the emotions that the Chicago movement spurred. Songs like “Keep on
Pushing” and “People Get Ready” placed Chicago soul group the Impressions at the
center of the freedom song’s transition from sacred-based songs to a more secular
genre. According to David Llorens, “[T]o the urban Negro . . . many of these songs
35
Carawan, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, 218.
Ibid., 184.
37
Lyrics in ibid., 184–85.
38
Ibid., 186.
36
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I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
309
provide[d] an emotional release from the omnipresent suffering, while stimulating
the will to struggle, serving them in much the same manner as the spirituals served
their enslaved forefathers.”39
Called the “movement fellows,” the Impressions started out in the Cabrini Green
area in Chicago in the 1950s. The group combined the gospel quartet sound with the
secular doo-wop of the time and consisted of members from two respective singing
groups. Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield had first met as teenagers and sang together
in the Northern Jubilee Gospel Singers and the Traveling Souls Spiritualist Church.
Sam Gooden and Richard and Arthur Brooks came from a group called the Roosters.
This quintet was rechristened the Impressions, who scored their first major hit in
1958 with the ballad “Your Precious Love.” Although Butler left the group to pursue
a solo career in 1960 the group continued to try to find its niche in the Chicago
music scene. Mayfield’s role in the group expanded beyond background vocalist
and guitarist with Butler’s departure. He became the group’s main songwriter and
arranger and created a sound that became associated with the Chicago soul idiom
for decades. In 1964 Mayfield started penning songs that were soon adopted by
the Chicago movement. These songs were deemed “message” or “sermon” songs
because like their southern counterparts they were contemporary readings of the
biblical concepts of freedom and transcendence, but set in a secular format. The first
of Mayfield’s message songs was “Keep on Pushing,” which reflected strongly the
group’s gospel roots. The song featured gospel-inspired harmonies complete with
falsetto accompanied by a shuffle beat that was enhanced by horns and Mayfield’s
guitar. The text “lent lyrical and spiritual support to the civil rights movement” and
“embraced a much wider audience who could equally apply them to the everyday
struggle in their own lives.”40
Keep on pushing. Keep on pushing. I got to keep on pushing. I can’t stop now. Move up a
little higher, someway, somehow. ’Cause I’ve got my strength, and it don’t make sense not
to keep on pushing.
Hallelujah, hallelujah. Keep on pushing.
Now maybe someday I’ll reach that higher goal. I know I can make it with just a little bit of
soul. ’Cause I’ve got my strength, and it don’t make sense. Not to keep on pushing.
Look-a, look-a yonder. What’s that I see? A great big stone wall stands there ahead of me.
But I’ve got my pride, and I move it all aside and keep on pushing.
Hallelujah, hallelujah. Keep on pushing. Keep on pushing.41
The following year Mayfield produced “People Get Ready,” which continued in the
songwriter’s adaptation of biblical themes of transcendence as metaphors for the
fight for equality. Unlike “Keep on Pushing,” “People Get Ready,” was a gospeltinged ballad that featured the swinging lead style that was popularized by gospel
quartets of the 1950s.
39
David Llorens, “New Birth in the Ghetto,” quoted in Carawan, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle,
192.
40
Peter Burns, Curtis Mayfield: People Never Give Up (London: Sanctuary Publishing, 2003), 29.
Curtis Mayfield, “Keep On Pushing,” The Anthology 1961–1977, MCA B000002olx, 1992. Lyrics
used by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.
41
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Kernodle
310
People get ready, there’s a train a-coming. You don’t need no baggage.
You just get on board. All you need is faith to hear the diesel hummin’.
Don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord.
People get ready for the train to Jordan. Picking up passengers coast to coast.
Faith is the key, open the doors and board them. There’s hope for all among this loving host.
There ain’t no room for the hopeless sinner. Who would hurt all mankind just to save his
own (believe me now). Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner. For there’s no
hiding place when against the Kingdom’s throne.42
Much in the same manner that spirituals like “Get on Board, Little Children” and
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “People Get Ready” utilized the metaphor of the gospel
train as the vehicle to freedom. When adapted to use within the movement the text
was altered in a number of ways. Instead of singing “for there’s no hiding place
when against the Kingdom’s throne,” activists proclaimed, “there’s no hiding place
when the Movement comes.” Another verse was added:
Don’t want no ‘Toms’ or any sorry Negroes. Comin’ to me saying they won’t go. Everybody
wants freedom. Everybody this I know.43
“People Get Ready” was followed by “Meeting Over Yonder” (1965) and in 1967
“We’re a Winner,” which moved away from the gospel-inspired sound of the previous songs as a dance tune complete with simulated party noises in the background.
“We’re a Winner” foreshadowed the type of black nationalist–inspired soul music that became the norm during the late 1960s and, like Simone’s “Mississippi
Goddamn,” was banned from radio. In 1967, WLS in Chicago refused to play
the record.44
The Late 1960s and the Rise of Black Nationalism
in Black Popular Music
By the late 1960s black nationalist themes that had been avoided by many who saw
integration and assimilation as the keys to equality became central themes in the
music, poetry, and art of the time. The Baraka-led Black Arts Movement had become
the central agent in shifting black vernacular culture into the academy. Although
many jazz musicians would align themselves with Baraka and his ambitions to
develop a distinct and identifiable black art that would reach the masses and the
upper echelons of society, most of their efforts were not largely acknowledged by the
media. However, Simone remained a central voice in articulating the struggle for
equality within mainstream jazz circles. The late 1960s brought a number of songs
that responded to the ever-changing climate of Black America, including issues
regarding its women. In 1965, Simone recorded “Four Women,” which was the first
song to insert gender into the context of the Black Arts movement. Whereas much
of the movement’s rhetoric had given the impression that the issue of racial equality
42
Curtis Mayfield, “People Get Ready,” The Anthology. Lyrics used by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.
43
Carawan, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, 193.
44
Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come, 146.
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I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
311
was more important than gender equality, Simone, along with Nikki Giovanni,
Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, and Aretha Franklin, refuted this notion. Like many
black women of the time, Simone openly avoided the women’s movement while
simultaneously acknowledging the hypocrisy and exploitation of black nationalist
movement. “Four Women” reflected that despite the efforts of black men within
the movement to free the black community from past stigmas and discrimination,
black women were still being defined in limited terms, such as skin color and hair
texture, attitudes often expressed by the white community. The song asserted that
notions of black nationalism and calls for racial pride did not necessarily reflect
what movement leaders practiced, especially as it related to relationships with white
women. As Winifred Breines explains:
Heterosexual black women were and wanted to be loyal to black men, and they longed for
black men to be loyal to them. But many men were not, and the women were hurt. . . .
Adding insult to injury, some male writers used the supposedly overbearing characteristics
of the black woman to defend the black man’s ‘escape’ to the white woman. Black women’s
hurt, anger, confusion and resentment crystallized around interracial liaisons between black
men and white women. . . . What does it mean when a black man spurns his own women
for outsiders? How can a black man lead black women to a black nation with white women
as queens? What does this say to the black woman?45
Complicating the matter further were the new definitions of blackness and beauty
that were being formulated through the black nationalist movement. Celebrations
of black skin, the black body, and the Afro became the focus of racial affirmation
and pride. But even these notions were stigmatizing to black women, as there
were strong notions about the way black women looked and behaved. Many found
that they were “on probation as black [women]” and “regularly reminded that
any indication of independence or aggression could mean that she would end up
alone, since no black man would want her.”46 For this reason, many women, to
the detriment of their own bodies and mental health, maneuvered through the
philosophical obstacles and stayed silent about their experiences. But by struggling
with her own issues of self-esteem, Simone sought to articulate the experiences of
black women.47
My skin is black. My arms are long. My hair is wooly. My back is strong.
Strong enough to take the pain inflicted again and again.
What do they call me? My name is Aunt Sarah. My name is Aunt Sarah.
My skin is yellow. My hair is long. Between two worlds, I do belong.
My father was rich and white. He forced my mother late one night.
What do they call me? My name is Saffronia. My name is Saffronia.
My skin is tan. My hair is fine. My hips invite you. My mouth like wine.
Whose little girl am I? Anyone who has money to buy. What do they call me?
My name is Sweet Thing. My name is Sweet Thing.
45
Winifred Breines, The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the
Feminist Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 62–63.
46
Ibid., 65.
47
For a discussion of Abbey Lincoln’s self-conception as articulated in her music, see Farah
Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York: Ballantine,
2002), 161–92.
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312
Kernodle
My skin is brown. And my manner is tough. I’ll kill the first mother I see.
’Cause my life has been too rough. I’m awfully bitter these days because my parents were
slaves. What do they call me? My name is Peaches.48
The song is a slow ballad in the key of a minor that is focused on a vamp by
bass and piano. The drums subtly emphasize the offbeats, while the guitarist softly
alternates between comping and antiphony with Simone’s voice. In the fourth and
fifth stanzas a flute begins to provide fill-ins and responses to Simone’s vocals, and
her piano becomes a more audible part of the performance. Between the second and
third stanzas there is a short interlude in which Simone solos on piano. She repeats
this between the third and fourth stanza with the bass, piano, and drums growing
louder and stronger in their vamping. The emotional intensity of the performance
is Simone’s voice, which becomes subtly different in timbre and texture with each
verse. In the last stanza her voice and the performance becomes aggressive, louder
and angrier reflecting the tone of the text. The performance ends with a slight ritard
before Simone screams, “My name is Peaches.”
“Four Women” struck a chord with black America as many black radio stations
refused to play the record, citing that it insulted black women.49 But these criticisms
were emblematic of the male-centered hypocrisy of both the civil rights and emerging black power movements. In all actuality the recording was far from insulting
to black women because it would serve as one of the strongest pronouncements
of black women’s experiences in America since the recordings of blues women in
the 1920s and 1930s. As she had done so poignantly with her previous freedom
songs, Simone constructed through “Four Women” a communal narrative out of
the invocation of her own personal experience. “My whole life had been full of doubt
and insecurity and I was never confident about what I was doing,” she recalled in her
autobiography. “All I really needed was someone to pull on my hand and say, ‘you’re
okay Nina. Leave yourself alone.’ All it [“Four Women”] did was to tell what entered
the minds of most black women in America when they thought about themselves.
Black women didn’t know what the hell they wanted because they were defined by
things they didn’t control and until they had the confidence to define themselves
they’d be stuck in the same mess forever. The song told the truth many people in the
USA—especially black men—simply weren’t ready to acknowledge at that time.”50
Although Simone would later claim that the black struggle was her priority at the
time and that she never aligned herself with women’s liberation, “Four Women”
came to serve as a strong manifesto of black feminist thought.
The year 1967 would bring “Backlash Blues,” which featured lyrics written by
Langston Hughes, and a version of jazz pianist Billy Taylor’s “I Wish I Knew How it
Would Feel to be Free.” “Backlash Blues” continued Simone’s proclivity for writing
songs that seemed more like political manifestos than documentaries of experiences
or songs of uplift like Mayfield’s. More so than her previous protest songs, “Backlash
Blues” addressed directly the issues King had focused on in his famous 1967 speech
48
“Four Women” was originally released on the album Let It All Out, Verve Music/Philips
B0006008-02, [1964] 2006.
49
Simone, I Put a Spell on You, 117.
50
Ibid.
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I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
313
at Manhattan’s Riverside Church. The speech marked a transition in King’s political
focus and became the basis of his Poor People’s Campaign, which many felt served
as the prelude to his 1968 assassination. The original recording of “Backlash Blues”
featured on the album Sings the Blues was set in the postwar urban blues sound of
Chicago with its harmonica, electric guitar, piano, bass, and drums accompaniment
and 12-bar blues structure. Simone’s singing is broken up in the third chorus
where the ensemble has an opportunity to stretch out in a chorus of collective
improvisation.
Mr. Backlash. Mr. Backlash, just who do you think I am.
You raise my taxes, freeze my wages and send my son to Vietnam.
You gave me second class houses, and second class schools.
Do you think that all colored folks are just second class fools.
Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you with the backlash blues.
When I try to find a job to earn a little cash. All you got to offer is your mean old
white backlash. But the world is big, big and bright and round. And it’s full of folks like me
who are black, yellow, beige and brown. Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you with the backlash
blues.
Mr. Backlash. Mr. Backlash just what do you think I got to lose.
I’m gonna leave you with the backlash blues. You’re the one who will have the blues.
Not me, just wait and see.51
“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” was a gospel-tinged jazz composition, whose original version by Taylor was said to have been a favorite of King’s.
Although Taylor’s version was instrumental, Simone used lyrics by Richard Lamb,
which by 1967 summed up the feelings of black America. Again it was a message
to detractors of the freedom movement, but presented in a less angry and caustic
tone than her previous songs. In the days following King’s death Simone would
write the “Why? The King of Love Is Dead,” which was first recorded during a live
performance in Westbury, New York, and released on the album ’Nuff Said. The
song, which reflected the feeling of hopelessness that was permeating America at the
time, later became a part of the Martin Luther King Suite that included “Mississippi
Goddamn” and “Sunday in Savannah.”
In late 1968 Simone, along with Weldon Irvine Jr., began writing “To Be Young,
Gifted and Black,” which took its title from the play Hansberry was writing before
her death in 1965 at the age of thirty-two. The song, released in 1969, musically
captured the tenets of the Black Arts Movement and the black nationalist movement
and also spoke to the hope expressed for the new generation despite the tragedy of
King’s death. Like “Mississippi Goddamn” it became another song adopted as an
anthem of the Black Power movement. But the style and sound of “To Be Young,
Gifted and Black” was very different from her previous freedom songs, drawing
more from late-1960s R&B and gospel than from jazz and folk traditions. The song
featured expanded instrumentation that included a horn section, electric bass,
organ, drums, and Simone on piano. Simone’s vocals were accompanied by a choir
of voices, in a style reminiscent of a gospel-style call and response. Absent is the raw,
51
“Backlash Blues” was originally released on the album Sings the Blues, RCA/LSP 3789, 1967.
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Kernodle
314
gritty texture and anger that defined Simone’s vocals in previous freedom songs.
The heavy electric bass sound (a lá Motown’s James Jamerson) along with the horn
riffs replaces Simone’s signature piano playing as the center of the performance and
serve as the elements that give the song its soul sensibilities. The text and structure
of the piece is as follows:
Verse 1: (D-flat major)
Choir: Young, gifted and black
Simone: Oh, what a lovely previous dream
Choir: To be young, gifted and black
Simone: Open your heart to what I mean
Bridge: Simone with male singer
In the whole world you know there’s a billion boys and girls
Who are young, gifted and black. And that’s a fact.
Verse 2:
Choir: You are young, gifted and black
Simone: We must begin to tell our young
Choir: There’s a world waiting for you
Simone: Yours is the quest that’s just begun
Bridge:
When you feel real low. There’s a great truth you should know.
When you’re young, gifted and black. Your soul’s intact.
Verse 3:
Choir: To be young, gifted and black
Simone: Oh, how I’ve longed to know the truth
Choir: There are times when I look back
Simone: And I am haunted by my youth
Bridge:
Oh, but my joy of today is that we can all be proud to say
To be young, gifted and black is where it’s at.52
The song became one of Simone’s biggest hits, reaching the top ten on the R&B
charts in 1969. CORE’s assertion that the song was “going to be declared the
‘National Anthem of Black America’ ” was recounted later by Simone as one of the
greatest accomplishments of her career. “I wasn’t in the movement for personal
glory, but this dedication made me very proud because it showed I was succeeding as a protest singer, that I was writing songs people remembered and were
inspired by.”53
52
Nina Simone and Weldon Irvine Jr, “Young, Gifted and Black,” RCA 0269, 1969; later released
on the album Black Gold, RCA Victor LSP 4248, 1970. The song has since been recorded by a number
of people, including Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway.
53
Simone, I Put a Spell on You, 108–9.
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I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
315
But by late 1968, Mayfield and Simone were no longer considered vanguards of
protest music since with the release of James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud”
black popular music no longer avoided nationalistic messages. The popularity of
the record, as well as Franklin’s “Respect,” would signify another period in the
development of the freedom or protest song—one that would eventually lead to
the emergence of hip-hop. The consciousness of black music in the late 1960s and
early 1970s never reached the explicit nature that Simone’s early freedom songs
had espoused, but it nevertheless continued to invoke a dialogue about the black
community and the world at large.
The protest music of the mid-1960s reflected many changes within the context of
the black freedom movement. Not only did songs such as “Mississippi Goddamn,”
“Keep on Pushing,” and “Burn, Baby, Burn” move the freedom song as a genre
beyond the spiritual-based songs that had defined the nonviolent, church-based
movement of King, but they foreshadowed the spatial migration of that movement,
its secularization, and the transition of rhetoric from nonviolence to self-defense,
integration to economic empowerment and independence. As this essay has shown,
a number of songwriters and performers contributed to the redefinition of the
freedom song in the mid-1960s, but the beginning of this shift was centered on
Simone and “Mississippi Goddamn.” Although protest music would not hold a
place of importance in her musical output after 1970, Simone remained committed
to expressing the fight for equality and continued to perform her protest songs in
live performances. Like most of the freedom fighters of the 1960s, she felt displaced
and without direction following the death of King. Collier and Chandler continued
to be central voices in the folk movement with their music making up another part
of the recorded history of the movement. Mayfield would continue throughout the
’60s and ’70s to be one of soul music’s most influential producers and songwriters.
Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye would aid in the continual evolution of soul
music, producing socially conscious music throughout the ’70s. Bernice Johnson
Reagon, who had been a song leader in the Albany movement and one of the
original SNCC Freedom Singers, went on to form Sweet Honey in the Rock, an
all-female a capella group whose repertoire draws on spirituals, freedom songs,
and folk tunes. Although the music of Simone, Mayfield, Chandler, and Collier was
significant in bridging two of the more well-known eras of protest music within the
black community, their significance lies in their documentation and articulation
of the evolving political views of the black community in the mid-1960s. The
consciousness reflected in their songs was not rooted in mainstream success or the
idea of creating black music that would attract white audiences with messages that
ignored social problems and racial identity—rather it was defined in a consciousness
that sought to inspire hope, faith, and perseverance in difficult times.
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Discography
Mayfield, Curtis. The Anthology 1961–1977. MCA B000002olx, 1992.
Simone, Nina. Black Gold. RCA Victor LSP 4248, 1970.
———. Four Women: The Nina Simone Philips Recordings. Verve 440 065 021-2,
2003.
———. In Concert. Philips PHM 200-135, 1964.
———. Let It All Out. Verve Music/Philips B0006008-02, [1964] 2006.
———. ’Nuff Said. RCA Vicor LPS 4065, 1968.
———. Silk and Soul. RCA Victor LPM 3837, 1967.
———. Sings the Blues. RCA/LSP 3789, 1967.
———. The Very Best of Nina Simone: Sugar in My Bowl, 1967–1972. RCA Victor
07863 67635-2, [1967] 1998.
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