“Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam,” (Simone, Mississippi Goddam) but unfortunately, not everybody knows about Nina Simone. My first encounter with the work of this profound woman, musician, and social activist came in class just yesterday, along with my first listen to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” Both first impressions were incredibly powerful, with “Strange Fruit” allowing a solemn, uncanny sense of discomfort to hang in the air around us, but it was hearing a live version of Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn,” that I found to be most hard hitting.
Although already a very emotionally and politically charged song, I was amazed by the tremendous passion with which Simone delivered the, at the time, very controversial lyrics. Though recorded decades and decades before I was born, in response to events that I only learned about in history class, listening to the track, I found myself taken to someplace far away from room 123B of Burnell Hall. This was not a place of safety and equality, but instead one of pain, grief, and persecution so strong that it refused to be contained any longer. Center stage of a nightclub in this tumultuous nation, a woman laments the state of her society. She is a lioness in mourning. Her oppressors fear her, and they are right to, because she is stronger than them. In front of her audience, she roars and becomes queen.
What I found to be the most intriguing about the recording, was the incredible amount of emotional anguish I felt, while also being given an unfathomable sense of hope at the same time. Hearing the strife in Simone’s voice and learning more about the context under which the song was written, I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the immense stress, frustration, and above all, the opaque futility that she must have felt being an African-American woman before and during the civil rights movement. One of the most maddening types of pain, in my experience, has always been the walls-closing-in strain of hopelessness. Sometimes no matter what you do, it seems as though you just can’t overcome certain struggles. This is where Simone shines the brightest, however. In the song, we feel her pain for sure, but she also shows us that we must always fight back against oppression, and face adversity with grit and resilience.
How does Simone show us this, you may ask? She did so by writing songs no one dared to write, and by saying things that no one dared to say before. She did so by being unapologetically herself and by refusing to compromise her beliefs in exchange for commercial success. She did so by taking a stand so that others could, and by choosing to live without fear. She did so by proving that oftentimes, we need to be our own heroes.
Nina Simone, though I’m sure constantly belittled, ridiculed, and hated in her time, was as strong and brave as anyone can ever hope to be. Her work, both on its own and contextually, resonates deeply with the political climate we face, even, and especially, today. Generations later, the “land of the free,” is still far from it, and hate runs rampant across all forms of social, broadcast, and televised media. With this constant bombardment of negativity and exclusion, we should all aspire to be as fearless and willing to confront injustice as Nina Simone.
Works Cited
Simone, Nina. “Mississippi Goddam.” Nina Simone in Concert, Philips Records, 1964.
Holiday, Billie. Meeropol, Abel. “Strange Fruit.” Commodore, 1939.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Web007rzSOI. 
I agree with you that the result of this song was ultimatley bottled up frustration and sadness, but that it also let out a ray of hope. I also love how you talked about she pretty much didn't care what others felt of her songs and if she wanted to say it she was going to.
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