C “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”: Nina ... · 1 “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” originally appeared on Nina Simone, Silk and Soul, RCA Victor LSP

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 theFreedom Song of the 1960s

TAMMY L. KERNODLE

AbstractThis article explores the work of pianist/vocalist Nina Simone as the catalyst for a new type offreedom song in the black freedom movement during the 1960s. It examines the lyrical contentand structure of Simone’s music, which reflects the rhetorical and geographical shift of thetransition from King’s nonviolent, southern-based civil rights movement of the late 1950s to themid-1960s to the militant black power nationalist movement of the late 1960s. Curtis Mayfield’sChicago soul style is also referenced as marking an important shift in mid-1960s R&B, whichhad 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 clearfor the whole wide world to hear.

—Nina Simone1

Over the past thirty years, numerous scholars have written extensively about andestablished the importance of the freedom song to the black freedom movementof the 1960s.2 Although this vast body of literature is sound in its articulationof 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 thatemerged in the mid-1960s and reflected the rhetorical and eventual philosophicaltransition of the movement from the nonviolent, interracial, church-based activismof 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 thisarticle.

1 “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” originally appeared on Nina Simone, Silk andSoul, RCA Victor LSP 3837/740506, 1967. It is also included on the compilation The Very Best of NinaSimone: 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 move-ment. See Kerran L. Sanger, “When the Spirit Says Sing!”: The Role of Freedom Songs in the Civil RightsMovement (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995); Bradford D. Martin, “Freedom Singers of the CivilRights Movement: Delivering a Message on the Front Lines,” in The Theater Is in the Street: Politics andPublic 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 ofSeattle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Let the ChurchSing ‘Freedom,’ ” Black Music Research Journal 7 (1987): 105–18; Clyde R. Appleton, “Singing in theStreets of Raleigh, 1963: Some Recollections,” The Black Perspective in Music 3/3 (Autumn 1975):243–52.

295

at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.39.106.173, on 02 Apr 2020 at 22:44:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available

https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097

https://www.cambridge.org/core

296 Kernodle

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers, andsimilar organizations.3 One is left with the impression that the articulation of blackpolitical rhetoric is defined solely in the freedom songs of the early 1960s andthe 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 inthe interim years of the ideological shift from nonviolence to self-defense, from asouthern, rural-based movement to an urban northern one, music played less of arole in the coordination of movement activities, yet it did not lose its importancein articulating the feelings and circumstances that motivated activists. By 1964 anew body of freedom or protest songs (the terms are used interchangeably) writtenby artists such as Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield, James Collier, and others came toreflect these shifts, serving as documentation of the evolving political identity ofyoung black America. It is through works such as “Mississippi Goddamn,” “Keepon Pushing,” and “Burn, Baby, Burn” that one can chronicle the growing anger thatexploded 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 thesecompositions, this article will survey the development of the freedom song from itsbeginnings as revamped spiritual and gospel song performed in call-and-responseformat to a secular individually performed song that reflected the feelings andaspirations of the larger community. I will also indicate how the early freedom orprotest songs of Simone became the blueprint for subsequent soul and jazz-basedcivil rights music, thus bridging two of the most highly identified periods of blackprotest music.

Although the music of the black freedom movement is today identified as beingjust as significant as the period’s speeches and documentary histories for under-standing the rhetoric and scope of the movement, music was not initially a majorelement of protest used by activists. The development of a core body of freedomsongs did not occur until the early 1960s. Although gospel hymns were used inthe marches and boycotts of the 1950s and the use of music as protest within theblack community can be documented as far back as the seventeenth century, itwas not viewed as an essential part of the early black freedom movement. Before1961 activists refrained from singing freedom songs publicly because of fear ofreprisal. But two entities redefined the public use of these songs: SNCC and theAlbany (Georgia) movement. Inspired by the activism of young college studentsduring the first sit-in on 1 February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, activistElla Baker sought a means to fortify the momentum of young activists acrossthe country. In April 1960 Baker held a conference that brought over two hundredparticipants to Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The two-day conferenceresulted in the creation of SNCC, which would serve as a student-based arm of themovement.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 PhilipSheldon 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 Committeeand Ella Baker, see Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical DemocraticVision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 239–98.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097


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 theagents that made the singing of freedom songs an important element of movementstrategy. Through the Albany movement of 1961, SNCC redefined the public useof music. Simple in their construction and initially adapted from spirituals andgospel songs, the freedom songs became “one of the best records . . . of the transfor-mation of consciousness in the ordinary people, the masses, who took part in themovement.”5

The public use of freedom songs, as defined by the Albany movement, wasthreefold. First, they were used to bridge real or perceived cultural gaps betweensouthern blacks and middle-class activists. Since singing had remained an importantfacet of the work and social lives of rural blacks, the act of singing on one’s porchserved as an important method in building relationships between activists and therural black constituency. Second, freedom songs conveyed key values and tactics ofthe 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 achieveit (i.e., Freedom Rides, sit-ins, wade-ins, going to jail). Finally, the performance offreedom songs became one of the ways in which grassroots leaders such as FannieLou Hamer emerged. Although Hamer became an identifiable representative of theMississippi Freedom Democratic Party that challenged the Democratic conventionfor recognition in 1964, she was also identified as one of the movement’s strongestsong leaders.

The freedom songs of the early 1960s fell into two general categories: profes-sionally composed topical songs that commented on protest events from a sidelineperspective and group participation songs that were adapted from spirituals orgospel songs with some textural modifications. In the latter case, personal pronounswere altered from first person singular to first person plural. Furthermore, thesesongs adopted traits of abolitionist and social gospel hymnody through the use ofcollective language, which fostered a sense of community. Within these songs the“we” had a personal bearing that reflected the notion that when the group overcameso did the individual. But the importance of these songs did not rest solely in theiruse in movement activities. In time they became central in communicating, to thoseoutside of the rural South, what activists faced in their pursuit of freedom. The useof freedom songs in this capacity reflected the growing interest and participation ofthe folk music community in the black freedom movement and the rise of singingensembles from within local campaigns. The formation of the SNCC FreedomSingers was central to this phenomenon. Organized by Cordell Reagon in 1962,the Freedom Singers’ main objective was to capitalize on the national recognitiongarnered by the music of the Albany movement. They carried the story of the studentmovement to the North and to non-black audiences during the peak years of thesouthern movement. Because SNCC believed that the press intentionally distortedthe meaning of the movement, the Freedom Singers sought alternative ways topresent what was occurring in the South. For them music was the instrument that

5 Reagon, quoted in Reed, The Art of Protest, 14.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097


298 Kernodle

would change public perceptions. Mixing spoken dialogue with freedom songs, thegroup illustrated for their audiences the struggles civil rights workers endured. Theaggregation debuted on 11 November 1962 in a concert with Pete Seeger.6 Overthe next four years the Freedom Singers’ relationship with the folk music scenedid much to further the scope and form of freedom songs. Songwriters such asBob Dylan, Len Chandler, Phil Ochs, and others began to treat movement themestopically in their songs and devoted their music and services to further several cam-paigns. Dylan’s “Oxford Town” told the story of James Meredith’s enrollment at theUniversity of Mississippi, and “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “The LonesomeDeath of Hattie Carroll” documented the deaths of civil rights worker Medgar Eversand 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 wouldblossom 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 attentionto 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 folkmovement’s participation in freedom movement activities hit its zenith in July 1963when Seeger organized a folk festival in Greenwood, Mississippi. The interracialgroup of performers that performed for the SNCC-sponsored event garnered asubstantial national audience through television coverage and an extensive write-up in the New York Times. Despite the festival’s success, it would prove to be the folkmovement’s swan song as the onslaught of Beatlemania and Dylan’s abandonmentof his role as political spokesman in 1965 sent the genre into a fight for its own sur-vival. 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 torhetorical transitions and factional divisions within the civil rights movement.8

In the months following the March on Washington in 1963, southern backlash andopposition grew to new and more violent levels. Evers was killed in his driveway infront of his wife and children, and four young girls sitting in their Sunday Schoolclass at the 16th Street Baptist Church, the spiritual heart of the local movementin Birmingham, were killed when the church was bombed the morning of Sunday,15 September 1963. The following summer SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Sum-mer project, a voter registration drive in Mississippi, was rocked when workersJames Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner disappeared after beingdetained and later released by the local sheriff. They would eventually be found

6 Martin, “Freedom Singers of the Civil Rights Movement,” 38–39.7 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 (ChapelHill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Dick Weissman, Which Side Are You On? An InsideHistory 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 blackpower movement, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston:Beacon Press, 2002), 60–109.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097



buried in a quarry not far from where they had gone earlier to investigate the burn-ing of a local church in Philadelphia, Mississippi.9 That same summer members ofthe Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an alternative to the state’s whites-onlyDemocratic Party, consisting of several local representatives including Fannie LouHamer, attended the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey,seeking recognition as a delegation. Their efforts were undermined by right-wingdelegates, President Lyndon Johnson, and concessions made by high-ranking blackleaders such as Dr. King, Roy Wilkins, and Bayard Rustin. The backdoor deals thatKing and other veteran leaders made with the administration cost these leaders therespect of the young activists, who felt they had taken more physical risks than theirolder counterparts. This further polarized SNCC and CORE from King’s movementand inspired the gradual shift to the black nationalist rhetoric of Malcolm X. In themonths following the 1964 convention SNCC splintered into two groups—thosewho wanted the group to become more disciplined (hard-liners) and those whowanted it to remain loose, informal, and familial (floaters).10 In time the hard-liners would assume control over the organization and some of the veteran workersdistanced themselves from the movement. They were replaced by a new group thatadvocated self-defense and empowerment rather than integration. By 1966 the newvision of SNCC was articulated for the world by Carmichael, who had begun popu-larizing the slogan “Black Power” during the Meredith March in Selma. Overnight,the group seemingly took on a different mission and complexion, with nationalistviews pushing many of the groups’ white members out and Carmichael and otherslooking toward the rhetoric of Malcolm X as their new governing ideology. It wouldmark the secularization of the black freedom movement. With SNCC and CORE’smove to more nationalistic and militant views the function of freedom songs withinthe movement and their lyrical content and context changed. At the center of thismusical shift was singer-songwriter and pianist Nina Simone, though in time, soulperformer Curtis Mayfield and folksinger James Collier would also contribute tothe 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 influentialvoices by 1963, her recorded material had crossed several genre distinctions andincluded everything from interpretations of spirituals like “Wade in the Water,”operatic selections like “I Loves You Porgy,” and folk songs like “Black Is the Colorof My True Love’s Hair.” But the escalating violence directed toward activists inthe South and a close friendship with playwright Lorraine Hansberry and otherpolitically 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 MississippiSummer Freedom Project see Adam Nossiter, Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of MedgarEvers (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994); Townsend Davis, Weary Feet, Rested Souls: A GuidedHistory of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); and Voices of Freedom: An OralHistory of the Civil Rights Movement from 1950s through the 1980s, ed. Henry Hampton and SteveFayer (New York: Bantam Books, 1990).

10 Ransby, Ella Baker, 342.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097


300 Kernodle

impact of these interactions was reflected in her music first in 1963. Over thenext seven years, from 1963 to 1970, Simone would write and perform some ofthe mid-1960s’ most explicit protest music, outside of the topical songs writtenby songwriters such as Matthew Jones, Carlton Reese, and others. Simone, bornEunice Waymon in Tyron, North Carolina, grew to fame in the 1950s playing thenightclubs and bars in Atlantic City and accompanying dancers and voice studentsin Philadelphia. After circulating in the nightclub scene in Philadelphia and NewYork, she translated her popularity with live audiences, who had made her anunderground cult sensation, to recording success with the Bethlehem label. Hertransition to the mainstream popular music scene was completed in 1959 with therelease 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 viewedher 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 infamouschitlin’ circuit, and jazz festivals throughout the United States had brought hermainstream popularity. “The New York press went crazy over me,” she later wrotein her autobiography. “Suddenly I was the hot new thing.”12

Simone’s expansive musical style and desire not to be categorized as an artist luredher 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 neatslot to file it away in. It was difficult for them because I was playing popular songs in aclassical style with a classical piano technique influenced by cocktail jazz. On top of that Iincluded spirituals and children’s songs in my performances and those sorts of songs wereautomatically identified with the folk movement. So saying what sort of music I playedgave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there, but italso meant I was appreciated across the board—by jazz, folk, pop and blues fans as well asadmirers of classical music. They finally ended up describing me as a ‘jazz-and-something-else singer.’ . . .

If I had to be called something it should have been a folk singer because there was more folkand blues than jazz in my playing.13

Two Village nightclubs were at the center of the evolution of Simone’s musical andpolitical identity during the late 1950s and early 1960s. They were the Village Gateand the Bitter End. As one of the centers of avant-garde jazz in New York duringthe 1960s, the Village Gate hosted not only the genre’s cutting-edge performers butnightly drew audiences that consisted of writers such as James Baldwin, LangstonHughes, and Hansberry, and activists such as LeRoi Jones (later known as AmiriBaraka) and Dick Gregory. Audiences with these individuals would greatly influenceSimone’s political consciousness, particularly her close friendship with Hansberry,who inspired the pianist to become actively involved with the freedom movementand use her music to advance the cause.

11 Simone initially wanted to be a concert pianist. Despite her talent and the support of hercommunity and family, she was denied admission to the Curtis Institute. See Nina Simone withStephen 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.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097



The Bitter End would prove more significant in the development of Simone’sprotest music. Located across the street from the Village Gate, the Bitter End wasconsidered the “Mother Church” of the folk movement by early 1960s, drawingnightly performances by artists such as Baez, Odetta, Chandler, and Dylan.14 ThereSimone found the formula that would define her freedom songs over the next fiveyears—create songs that reflected the artist’s true identity, keep them as simpleas possible musically, and write texts that were real in their presentation of worldevents. Whereas the protest music of the folk movement remained largely definedin a left-wing context, Simone’s songs blended the aesthetic beliefs of the BlackArts Movement with the rhetoric of Malcolm X and the emerging black nationalistmovement.

Simone’s transition from jazz chanteuse to the “voice of the movement” firstmanifested in 1963 following the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church inBirmingham. Although she had followed the increased activism of the southernblack 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 andlive your life as best you could, as if acknowledging the existence of racism wasin itself a kind of defeat.”15 But through the example of Parks and Montgomery’slarger black community, she came to understand “for the first time the power ofcollective action.”16 The warrantless act of terrorism that resulted in the deaths offour young girls sitting in their Sunday School class spurred Simone to no longerremain an observer of the struggle. She began to use her popularity with crossoveraudiences to convey the feelings that white southern backlash against the movementwas 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 Ihad denied to myself for so long rose up and slapped my face. The bombing of the little girlsin Alabama and the murder of Medgar Evers were like the final pieces of a jigsaw that madeno sense until you had fitted the whole thing together. I suddenly realized what it was to beblack in America in 1963, but it wasn’t an intellectual connection of the type Lorraine hadbeen 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 readingof the struggle for freedom veiled in Christian-based lyrics of transcendence, suchas the freedom songs popularized at mass meetings or by ensembles like the SNCCFreedom Singers, Selma Freedom Choir, Nashville Quartet, or other artistic factionsthat arose within the larger movement.“Mississippi Goddamn” addressed explicitlya 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 (NewYork: Cooper Square Press, 2000), xiii.

15 Simone, I Put a Spell on You, 86.16 Ibid.17 Ibid., 89.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097


302 Kernodle

activities. Four major themes emerged in the lyrics: 1) explicit articulation of theanger and hatred that was bubbling under the surface in northern cities and youngersegments of the freedom movement; 2) a growing sense of secularism; 3) a turn fromthe rhetoric of nonviolence, both of which were becoming increasingly evident inSNCC by 1963; and 4) the mythology of assimilation and politics of respectabilitythat had defined black middle-class life since the late nineteenth century. LikeJohn’s apocalyptic visions in the Book of Revelation, the lyrics also predicted aday of reckoning for the racist states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, anddetractors of desegregation. But beyond the narrative of the lyrics, “MississippiGoddamn” was unique in its musical structure and form. Moving away fromthe call-and-response, a capella gospel-tinged performances of the more popularfreedom songs, “Mississippi Goddamn” took on the structure and form of anup-tempo show tune, with piano, bass, and drum accompaniment. As with otherfreedom songs the focus of the performance was Simone’s voice, which transitionedfrom her singing plainly the first phrase of text to an almost screaming exclamationof the famous line “everyone knows about ‘Mississippi goddamn!’” The song wassimple, utilizing a loosely constructed AABA, 32-bar form that was centered on therefrain “Alabama’s got me so upset. Tennessee made me lose my rest and everybodyknows about Mississippi goddamn!” Simone’s performance of this refrain framedthe song’s two main verses and bridge section, which seems programmatic in itsstructure as it fluctuated to reflect contextual changes in the text. A textural andmelodic 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 aboutMississippi 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 longersomebody say a prayer.

(A) Alabama’s got me so upset. Tennessee made me lose my rest and everybody knows aboutMississippi goddamn!

Modulation to A minor

(A′) Hound dogs on my trail, school children sittin’ in jails. Black cat crossed my path. Ithink 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 belonghere, 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 Iknow. They keep on saying—Go slow.

Bridge section: Free in melodic and textual form; serves as transition back to refrainand 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



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097



(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 knowsabout 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 likea 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 youanymore. 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 Missis-sippi, 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 thedrummer playing each beat, the bassist playing double octave stops, and Simone’spiano vamping on the main harmonies. The instruments maintain this supportingrole, common to other freedom songs, allowing Simone’s voice to be the completefocus of the performance. The vamping is stopped only to emphasize “goddamn,”which is followed by punctuating chords. The song focuses on a few harmonies perverse, but Simone makes a significant modulation to the relative minor (a minor) asthe text shifts in focus to specifics that framed movement activities such as “hounddogs on my trail, school children sittin’ in jail.” The bridge section uses the call-and-response aesthetic of the mass meetings with the band members respondingto Simone’s exclamations with “go slow.” Brian Ward refers to the song as “theclosest rhythm and blues got in the early 1960s to Martin Luther King’s ‘Letterfrom Birmingham Jail,’ the famous 1963 epistle in which the imprisoned civil rightsleader confronted the criticisms of some white clergymen that he was irresponsiblyseeking too much racial change too quickly.”18

But Ward’s interpretation of Simone’s music as R&B is not correct, as the pianist’sstyle 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 synthesisof 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.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097


304 Kernodle

generation through the expression of universality of experience. The R&B releasedby 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, asynthesis of jazz and folk styles, was largely ignored by pop and black radio. Despitethe fact that her music would be closely associated with the freedom movement asthe 1960s progressed, she never achieved the type of widespread popularity that hercounterparts (e.g., Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin) did.

Simone’s ingenuity as a songwriter is revealed in “Mississippi Goddamn” in set-ting a highly emotional and angry text as an up-tempo popular song. By stretchingbeyond the general form associated with freedom or protest music, Simone attractedlisteners who were not expecting the upbeat style of her musical accompaniment tobe coupled with such explicit lyrics. This is most evident in listening to the versionthat appears on the In Concert album. Simone introduces the tune to the audienceby stating “the name of this song is ‘Mississippi Goddamn’ and I mean every wordof it.” The audience responds with laughter, which disappears as the song progressesand Simone continues to dialogue with the audience between verses. Although therecorded response at the conclusion of the song is loud applause, it is clear that thesong’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 theuse of the word “goddamn” as profane and used this as justification for not sellingit. Others simply did not agree with the song’s message and communicated that ina variety of ways. In one instance a dealer in South Carolina sent a whole crate ofthe records back to the recording company with each one snapped in half.20 Someradio stations went as far as bleeping out “goddamn” and changing the wordingon the album sleeve, but it did not stop the song from growing in popularity. Thesong became a staple in Simone’s nightly performances at the Village Gate andmuch like Billie Holiday decades earlier with her performances of “Strange Fruit”at Cafe Society, “Mississippi Goddamn” became the one song people came to hearSimone 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. Litby the light of a single spot, seated at the grand piano, she cut a striking figure, elegantand proud. Night after night, I’d wait for her to sing “Mississippi Goddamn.” Everybodyknows about Mississippi—goddamn! She’d bellow as the audiences went wild. I’ve neverseen protest rendered so dramatically.21

Vocalist Abbey Lincoln, who had made her political statements with the recordingWe Insist! Freedom Now Suite (1960), asserted: “To really understand the 1960s, youhad 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, 90.20 Ibid.21 Robert Guillaume, quoted in liner notes to Four Women: The Nina Simone Philips Recordings,

Verve 440 065 021-2, 2003.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097



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 Movementjust 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” eruptedout of her quicker than she could write it down, and that upon its completion sheknew that she would dedicate herself to the struggle of black justice, freedom, andequality 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 thefreedom songs that accompanied the movement’s activities at the time. Texturallythe song moved beyond being a documentary of movement activities and servedmore as a political manifesto set to music. The release of “Mississippi Goddamn” notonly marked the awakening of Simone’s political beliefs but symbolized the breakingof her musical inhibitions. Later Simone would say “until songs like ‘MississippiGoddamn’ just burst out of me I had musical problems as well. How can you takethe memory of a man like Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and ahalf 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 itstripped the dignity away from the people that it was trying to celebrate.”25

In Concert included another protest song—“Ol’ Jim Crow.” Like “MississippiGoddamn,” “Ol’ Jim Crow” was a militant, hard-line statement against the growingresistance against activists and the rising tide of desegregation. The song movedaway from the Broadway-inspired sound of “Mississippi Goddamn” to reveal aswinging jazz tune in the hard bop vein. Simone’s piano was once again supportedby bassist Lisle Atkinson, drummer Bobby Hamilton, and guitarist Rudy Stevenson,but her voice and the performance takes on a strikingly different approach thanthat displayed in “Mississippi Goddamn.” The anger that defined the latter wastempered into a more laid-back, soulful style of delivery. The structure of thepiece 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 rightsmovement, 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 andSimone’s work to raise funds for SNCC would mark the beginning of a six-yearperiod of protest music that reflected the changing ideologies of SNCC and otherfactions of the movement.

In Concert also marked a modification in Simone’s concert repertoire. In additionto folk songs and Broadway tunes, protest music became an important facet of herlive performances. “I stopped singing love songs,” she stated. “Because protest songs

22 Abbey Lincoln, quoted in liner notes to Four Women.23 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.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097


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 student-led SNCC during the mid-1960s. By 1965 many within the freedom movement hadcome to similar revelations. Some SNCC members had begun stockpiling weaponsand expressing the benefits of what they called “armed self-defense.” By the end of1965 most of the group’s white members would be expelled and the new leaderswould rhetorically align themselves with the armed anticolonial movements of theThird World. The time of nonviolence and loving your oppressor was over foryounger segments of the movement. But most important is the role these shiftingphilosophies would play in changing the function of music within the movement.As SNCC member Julius Lester wrote in 1965, the movement was quickly shiftingaway 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 “thatall men are endowed with certain inalienable rights.” America has had precious chances inthis decade to make it come true. Now it is over—the days of singing freedom songs andthe days of combating bullets and billy clubs with love. “We Shall Overcome” (and we haveovercome our blindness) sounds old, out-dated and can enter the pantheon of the greatsalong with the IWW songs and the union songs. . . . The people are too busy getting readyto fight to bother with singing anymore. And as for love? That’s always been better done inbed 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 “Toomuch love, too much love, nothing kills a nigger like too much love.”28

Simone’s successive freedom songs became the embodiment of these beliefs andserved as a strong link connecting the different militant factions developing acrossthe country. With King’s focus shifting away from a southern-based movement tothe issues of de facto segregation in the North both cultural and generational gapswere created. Carmichael, one of the SNCC leaders instrumental in the split fromKing’s rhetoric of nonviolence, declared that Simone was “the true singer of thecivil rights movement,” and though other prominent black performers distancedthemselves from the group, Simone openly acknowledged her relationship withSNCC and on several occasions headlined fund-raisers for it.29 Like many of theearly activists Simone felt that nonviolence had been successful in winning earlybattles against segregation, but the escalated violence that the Freedom Rides andMississippi Freedom Summer Project had inspired led her to believe that suchmethods would not always be successful. “I knew a time might come where wewould have to fight for what was right, and I had no problem with that: the KuKlux Klan weren’t non-violent, and neither were the police nor the government ifthey 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 Inter-views (New York: Da Capo Press, [1977] 1993), 150.

28 Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Songs of the Freedom Movement, comp. Guy Carawan (NewYork: Oak Publications, 1968), 221.

29 Simone, I Put a Spell On You, 98.30 Ibid., 94–95.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097



made SNCC workers forget their nonviolent training more than the theft [by otherSNCC members] of their books and Nina Simone records.31 Whereas Simone’smusic was popular with those involved with the movement, it failed to find anywidespread popularity with black or white audiences. Jazz, blues, and folk audiencesacknowledged and publicly proclaimed the merits and artistry of her music, but popand R&B audiences largely avoided her non-R&B sound. Black audiences, especiallyyouth audiences, during the 1960s defined their identity in the emerging R&B stylesand not in the jazz and blues of the World War II generation. With the integrationof black R&B styles into the mainstream a consciousness about the movement andthe political struggles of black America were noticeably absent.32 In the case ofMotown, Gordy sought to distance the music produced by the label from overtpolitical statements in order not to offend white record buyers. Despite this, manytook Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” as a call to riot. AtlanticRecords would later produce Franklin’s version of Otis Redding’s “Respect,” whichwould become one of the anthems of black America.33 Therefore Simone’s musicrepresented one of the first manifestations of a black popular music that reflecteda lack of self-consciousness, with its focus on a free, African-centered performancestyle and lyrics that expressed the experiences of the larger community. LeRoi Jonesreferred to this type of music in his seminal work Black Music as “unity music,” thatis, “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 reevaluationand rise, a social spiritualism.”34 But Simone would not be the only musician toredefine the structure and lyrical context of the freedom song and the consciousnessof black popular music.

Keep On Pushing: Music and the Northern Movement

As the movement headed northward in 1966 not only did Mississippi and othersouthern states move from its focal point, but the songs that had accompaniedthe 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 songsthat mirrored the northern urban experience, which was more defined by gospel-influenced soul music, began to document the movement’s activities. While Dylan,Seeger, and many other folk singers no longer made the movement their musicalfocal point, black folksingers like Collier and Chandler continued to documentthe movement in song. These folk songs were patterned after the type of explicitpronunciations of change first presented in “Mississippi Goddamn.” Songs like

31 Ibid, 95.32 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 (NewYork: 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.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097


308 Kernodle

Collier’s “Burn, Baby, Burn” and Chandler’s “The Movement’s Moving On” soughtto capture the brewing anger in the form of riots that was spawned by the growingbacklash 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 itsown Summer Project to protest the murder of a 13-year old boy by a policeman. SummerProjects, northern style, usually involve filling a Coke bottle with gasoline, stuffing a ragdown 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 granddaddyof them all, Watts, to come the following summer.35

The Chicago movement found its voice in the songs of Collier, who worked withKing as an organizer. As vividly as songwriters like Matthew Jones had been indocumenting the sights, sounds, and experiences of the southern movement, Collierdid the same in expressing what black life was like in the slums of Chicago. Thesong “Lead Poison on the Wall” discussed the danger of poor children eating thelead paint used in many South side tenements. Collier explained the inspiration forthe song as follows:

Little children who are hungry all the time will chew on anything, so they’ve been eatingpaint that chipped off their walls. We found out about thirty kids died last year in Chicagofrom 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 coverthe community, taking urine samples to spot danger in time and distributing informationabout lead poisoning. Then with rallies we made it a public issue. Eventually Mayor Daleyput three hundred people to work in the community on the problem, using war on povertymoney. 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 themsmall. 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 thelandlord does nothing to stop it all. That death on the walls.37

“Rent Strike Blues” addressed other issues associated with life in the tenementslike 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 Bythe mid-1960s R&B was moving away from its aversion to political themes and cameto represent the emotions that the Chicago movement spurred. Songs like “Keep onPushing” and “People Get Ready” placed Chicago soul group the Impressions at thecenter of the freedom song’s transition from sacred-based songs to a more seculargenre. According to David Llorens, “[T]o the urban Negro . . . many of these songs

35 Carawan, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, 218.36 Ibid., 184.37 Lyrics in ibid., 184–85.38 Ibid., 186.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097



provide[d] an emotional release from the omnipresent suffering, while stimulatingthe will to struggle, serving them in much the same manner as the spirituals servedtheir enslaved forefathers.”39

Called the “movement fellows,” the Impressions started out in the Cabrini Greenarea in Chicago in the 1950s. The group combined the gospel quartet sound with thesecular doo-wop of the time and consisted of members from two respective singinggroups. Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield had first met as teenagers and sang togetherin 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 in1958 with the ballad “Your Precious Love.” Although Butler left the group to pursuea solo career in 1960 the group continued to try to find its niche in the Chicagomusic scene. Mayfield’s role in the group expanded beyond background vocalistand guitarist with Butler’s departure. He became the group’s main songwriter andarranger and created a sound that became associated with the Chicago soul idiomfor decades. In 1964 Mayfield started penning songs that were soon adopted bythe Chicago movement. These songs were deemed “message” or “sermon” songsbecause like their southern counterparts they were contemporary readings of thebiblical concepts of freedom and transcendence, but set in a secular format. The firstof Mayfield’s message songs was “Keep on Pushing,” which reflected strongly thegroup’s gospel roots. The song featured gospel-inspired harmonies complete withfalsetto accompanied by a shuffle beat that was enhanced by horns and Mayfield’sguitar. 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 everydaystruggle in their own lives.”40

Keep on pushing. Keep on pushing. I got to keep on pushing. I can’t stop now. Move up alittle higher, someway, somehow. ’Cause I’ve got my strength, and it don’t make sense notto 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 ofsoul. ’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 thesongwriter’s adaptation of biblical themes of transcendence as metaphors for thefight for equality. Unlike “Keep on Pushing,” “People Get Ready,” was a gospel-tinged ballad that featured the swinging lead style that was popularized by gospelquartets 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), 29.41 Curtis Mayfield, “Keep On Pushing,” The Anthology 1961–1977, MCA B000002olx, 1992. Lyrics

used by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097


310 Kernodle

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 hisown (believe me now). Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner. For there’s nohiding 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 gospeltrain as the vehicle to freedom. When adapted to use within the movement the textwas altered in a number of ways. Instead of singing “for there’s no hiding placewhen against the Kingdom’s throne,” activists proclaimed, “there’s no hiding placewhen the Movement comes.” Another verse was added:

Don’t want no ‘Toms’ or any sorry Negroes. Comin’ to me saying they won’t go. Everybodywants 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 previ-ous 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 mu-sic that became the norm during the late 1960s and, like Simone’s “MississippiGoddamn,” was banned from radio. In 1967, WLS in Chicago refused to playthe 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 sawintegration and assimilation as the keys to equality became central themes in themusic, poetry, and art of the time. The Baraka-led Black Arts Movement had becomethe central agent in shifting black vernacular culture into the academy. Althoughmany jazz musicians would align themselves with Baraka and his ambitions todevelop a distinct and identifiable black art that would reach the masses and theupper echelons of society, most of their efforts were not largely acknowledged by themedia. However, Simone remained a central voice in articulating the struggle forequality within mainstream jazz circles. The late 1960s brought a number of songsthat responded to the ever-changing climate of Black America, including issuesregarding its women. In 1965, Simone recorded “Four Women,” which was the firstsong to insert gender into the context of the Black Arts movement. Whereas muchof 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 Pub-lishing Co., Inc.

43 Carawan, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, 193.44 Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come, 146.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097



was more important than gender equality, Simone, along with Nikki Giovanni,Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, and Aretha Franklin, refuted this notion. Like manyblack women of the time, Simone openly avoided the women’s movement whilesimultaneously acknowledging the hypocrisy and exploitation of black nationalistmovement. “Four Women” reflected that despite the efforts of black men withinthe 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 hairtexture, attitudes often expressed by the white community. The song asserted thatnotions of black nationalism and calls for racial pride did not necessarily reflectwhat movement leaders practiced, especially as it related to relationships with whitewomen. As Winifred Breines explains:

Heterosexual black women were and wanted to be loyal to black men, and they longed forblack 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 characteristicsof the black woman to defend the black man’s ‘escape’ to the white woman. Black women’shurt, anger, confusion and resentment crystallized around interracial liaisons between blackmen and white women. . . . What does it mean when a black man spurns his own womenfor outsiders? How can a black man lead black women to a black nation with white womenas queens? What does this say to the black woman?45

Complicating the matter further were the new definitions of blackness and beautythat were being formulated through the black nationalist movement. Celebrationsof black skin, the black body, and the Afro became the focus of racial affirmationand pride. But even these notions were stigmatizing to black women, as therewere strong notions about the way black women looked and behaved. Many foundthat they were “on probation as black [women]” and “regularly reminded thatany indication of independence or aggression could mean that she would end upalone, since no black man would want her.”46 For this reason, many women, tothe detriment of their own bodies and mental health, maneuvered through thephilosophical obstacles and stayed silent about their experiences. But by strugglingwith her own issues of self-esteem, Simone sought to articulate the experiences ofblack 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 theFeminist 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.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097


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 wereslaves. 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 bybass and piano. The drums subtly emphasize the offbeats, while the guitarist softlyalternates between comping and antiphony with Simone’s voice. In the fourth andfifth stanzas a flute begins to provide fill-ins and responses to Simone’s vocals, andher piano becomes a more audible part of the performance. Between the second andthird stanzas there is a short interlude in which Simone solos on piano. She repeatsthis between the third and fourth stanza with the bass, piano, and drums growinglouder and stronger in their vamping. The emotional intensity of the performanceis Simone’s voice, which becomes subtly different in timbre and texture with eachverse. In the last stanza her voice and the performance becomes aggressive, louderand angrier reflecting the tone of the text. The performance ends with a slight ritardbefore Simone screams, “My name is Peaches.”

“Four Women” struck a chord with black America as many black radio stationsrefused to play the record, citing that it insulted black women.49 But these criticismswere emblematic of the male-centered hypocrisy of both the civil rights and emerg-ing black power movements. In all actuality the recording was far from insultingto black women because it would serve as one of the strongest pronouncementsof black women’s experiences in America since the recordings of blues women inthe 1920s and 1930s. As she had done so poignantly with her previous freedomsongs, Simone constructed through “Four Women” a communal narrative out ofthe invocation of her own personal experience. “My whole life had been full of doubtand insecurity and I was never confident about what I was doing,” she recalled in herautobiography. “All I really needed was someone to pull on my hand and say, ‘you’reokay Nina. Leave yourself alone.’ All it [“Four Women”] did was to tell what enteredthe 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 bythings they didn’t control and until they had the confidence to define themselvesthey’d be stuck in the same mess forever. The song told the truth many people in theUSA—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 thetime 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 byLangston Hughes, and a version of jazz pianist Billy Taylor’s “I Wish I Knew How itWould Feel to be Free.” “Backlash Blues” continued Simone’s proclivity for writingsongs that seemed more like political manifestos than documentaries of experiencesor songs of uplift like Mayfield’s. More so than her previous protest songs, “BacklashBlues” 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/PhilipsB0006008-02, [1964] 2006.

49 Simone, I Put a Spell on You, 117.50 Ibid.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097



at Manhattan’s Riverside Church. The speech marked a transition in King’s politicalfocus and became the basis of his Poor People’s Campaign, which many felt servedas 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 ofChicago with its harmonica, electric guitar, piano, bass, and drums accompanimentand 12-bar blues structure. Simone’s singing is broken up in the third choruswhere the ensemble has an opportunity to stretch out in a chorus of collectiveimprovisation.

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 oldwhite backlash. But the world is big, big and bright and round. And it’s full of folks like mewho are black, yellow, beige and brown. Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you with the backlashblues.

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 compo-sition, 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 messageto detractors of the freedom movement, but presented in a less angry and caustictone than her previous songs. In the days following King’s death Simone wouldwrite the “Why? The King of Love Is Dead,” which was first recorded during a liveperformance in Westbury, New York, and released on the album ’Nuff Said. Thesong, which reflected the feeling of hopelessness that was permeating America at thetime, later became a part of the Martin Luther King Suite that included “MississippiGoddamn” 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 beforeher death in 1965 at the age of thirty-two. The song, released in 1969, musicallycaptured the tenets of the Black Arts Movement and the black nationalist movementand also spoke to the hope expressed for the new generation despite the tragedy ofKing’s death. Like “Mississippi Goddamn” it became another song adopted as ananthem 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, drawingmore from late-1960s R&B and gospel than from jazz and folk traditions. The songfeatured expanded instrumentation that included a horn section, electric bass,organ, drums, and Simone on piano. Simone’s vocals were accompanied by a choirof 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.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097


314 Kernodle

gritty texture and anger that defined Simone’s vocals in previous freedom songs.The heavy electric bass sound (a la Motown’s James Jamerson) along with the hornriffs replaces Simone’s signature piano playing as the center of the performance andserve as the elements that give the song its soul sensibilities. The text and structureof the piece is as follows:

Verse 1: (D-flat major)

Choir: Young, gifted and blackSimone: Oh, what a lovely previous dreamChoir: To be young, gifted and blackSimone: Open your heart to what I mean

Bridge: Simone with male singer

In the whole world you know there’s a billion boys and girlsWho are young, gifted and black. And that’s a fact.

Verse 2:

Choir: You are young, gifted and blackSimone: We must begin to tell our youngChoir: There’s a world waiting for youSimone: 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 blackSimone: Oh, how I’ve longed to know the truthChoir: There are times when I look backSimone: And I am haunted by my youth

Bridge:

Oh, but my joy of today is that we can all be proud to sayTo 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&Bcharts 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 thegreatest accomplishments of her career. “I wasn’t in the movement for personalglory, but this dedication made me very proud because it showed I was succeed-ing as a protest singer, that I was writing songs people remembered and wereinspired by.”53

52 Nina Simone and Weldon Irvine Jr, “Young, Gifted and Black,” RCA 0269, 1969; later releasedon the album Black Gold, RCA Victor LSP 4248, 1970. The song has since been recorded by a numberof people, including Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway.

53 Simone, I Put a Spell on You, 108–9.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097



But by late 1968, Mayfield and Simone were no longer considered vanguards ofprotest 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 ofthe record, as well as Franklin’s “Respect,” would signify another period in thedevelopment of the freedom or protest song—one that would eventually lead tothe emergence of hip-hop. The consciousness of black music in the late 1960s andearly 1970s never reached the explicit nature that Simone’s early freedom songshad espoused, but it nevertheless continued to invoke a dialogue about the blackcommunity and the world at large.

The protest music of the mid-1960s reflected many changes within the context ofthe black freedom movement. Not only did songs such as “Mississippi Goddamn,”“Keep on Pushing,” and “Burn, Baby, Burn” move the freedom song as a genrebeyond the spiritual-based songs that had defined the nonviolent, church-basedmovement 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 thefreedom song in the mid-1960s, but the beginning of this shift was centered onSimone and “Mississippi Goddamn.” Although protest music would not hold aplace of importance in her musical output after 1970, Simone remained committedto expressing the fight for equality and continued to perform her protest songs inlive performances. Like most of the freedom fighters of the 1960s, she felt displacedand without direction following the death of King. Collier and Chandler continuedto be central voices in the folk movement with their music making up another partof 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 soulmusic, producing socially conscious music throughout the ’70s. Bernice JohnsonReagon, who had been a song leader in the Albany movement and one of theoriginal SNCC Freedom Singers, went on to form Sweet Honey in the Rock, anall-female a capella group whose repertoire draws on spirituals, freedom songs,and folk tunes. Although the music of Simone, Mayfield, Chandler, and Collier wassignificant in bridging two of the more well-known eras of protest music within theblack community, their significance lies in their documentation and articulationof the evolving political views of the black community in the mid-1960s. Theconsciousness reflected in their songs was not rooted in mainstream success or theidea of creating black music that would attract white audiences with messages thatignored social problems and racial identity—rather it was defined in a consciousnessthat sought to inspire hope, faith, and perseverance in difficult times.

References

Appleton, Clyde R. “Singing in the Streets of Raleigh, 1963: Some Recollections.”The Black Perspective in Music 3/3 (Autumn 1975): 243–52.

Breines, Winifred. The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and BlackWomen in the Feminist Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097


316 Kernodle

Burns, Peter. Curtis Mayfield: People Never Give Up. London: Sanctuary Publishing,2003.

Carawan, Guy, comp. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Songs of the Freedom Move-ment. New York: Oak Publications, 1968.

Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s.Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Colby, Paul, and Martin Fitzpatrick. The Bitter End: Hanging out at America’sNightclub. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000.

Davis, Townsend. Weary Feet, Rested Souls: A Guided History of the Civil RightsMovement. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.

Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Foner, Philip Sheldon. The Black Panthers Speak. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970.Griffin, Farah Jasmine. If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday.

New York: Ballantine, 2002.Hampton, Henry, and Steve Fayer, eds. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the

Civil Rights Movement from 1950s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam Books,1990.

Jones, LeRoi [Imamu Amiri Baraka]. “The Changing Same (R&B and New BlackMusic).” In Black Music, 180–211. New York: Da Capo Press, [1967] 1998.

Joseph, Peniel E., ed. The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–BlackPower Era. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: BeaconPress, 2002.

Martin, Bradford D. “Freedom Singers of the Civil Rights Movement: Delivering aMessage on the Front Lines.” In The Theater Is in the Street: Politics and PublicPerformance in Sixties America, 20–48. Amherst: University of MassachusettsPress, 2004.

Neal, Mark Anthony. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black PopularCulture. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Nossiter, Adam. Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers.Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Posner, Gerald. Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power. New York: Random House,[2002] 2005.

Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical DemocraticVision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “Let the Church Sing ‘Freedom.’” Black Music ResearchJournal 7 (1987): 105–118.

Reed, T. V. The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movementto the Streets of Seattle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Sanger, Kerran L. “When the Spirit Says Sing!”: The Role of Freedom Songs in theCivil Rights Movement. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995.

Seeger, Pete, Bob Reiser, Guy Carawan, and Candie Carawan. Everybody Says Free-dom. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.

Simone, Nina. With Stephen Cleary. I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of NinaSimone. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097



Taylor, Arthur. “Nina Simone.” In Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews,148–59. New York: Da Capo Press, [1977] 1993.

Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, andRace Relations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Weissman, Dick. Which Side Are You On? An Inside History of the Folk Music Revivalin America. New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2006.

Werner, Craig. A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America. NewYork: Plume, 1998.

DiscographyMayfield, 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.



https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097


Documents

C “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”: Nina ... · 1 “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” originally appeared on Nina Simone, Silk and Soul, RCA Victor LSP