.THE HANDSTAND

MAY 2003

 
Mississippi Goddam
(1963) Nina Simone

 The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam
And I mean every word of it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I made you thought I was kiddin' didn't we

Picket lines
School boy cots
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
for my sister my brother my people and me

Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie

Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You're all gonna die and die like flies
I don't trust you any more
You keep on saying "Go slow!"
"Go slow!"

But that's just the trouble
"do it slow"
Desegregation
"do it slow"
Mass participation
"do it slow"
Reunification
"do it slow"
Do things gradually
"do it slow"
But bring more tragedy
"do it slow"
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it
I don't know
I don't know

You don't have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam


A memory of Nina Simone by David Marsh.
JAZZ SINGER?

She had a different idea. "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." Maybe that's true of her piano playing. But her singing, not her playing, defined her.

The term describes her militant presence in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the way that she sang, both within and without the limits of predictable cadence and melody. More than that, it describes what she sought. Like her good friends James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, Nina Simone made art about wanting to live like a free person. This certainly didn't mean to live-or to sing-like a white person or for that matter, an American. But an unshakable, irrevocable commitment to her own self-worth, and by extension, ours, too. This is what Aretha Franklin and everyone else found in songs like "To Be Young Gifted and Black" and it's what let Simone set "Mississippi Goddamn," otherwise a "protest" song, to a jaunty cabaret arrangement and fill it with jokes that turn out to be time-bombs. The shadow that she casts across her blues, especially "Noobdy's Fault But Mine" and "Work Song," represents not so much what it is to live without freedom as what it is to live with the fear of losing the sense of self that allows freedom to exist.

Her classical training made her wish that she could convey that spirit simply by singing her songs. If you hear her sing "I Put a Spell On You," "I Loves You Porgy" or "To Love Somebody," you know she could-she still stands as the greatest interpretive singer of the '60s, pouncing on songs by the likes of Dylan, Leonard Cohen, George Harrison and Randy Newman with cat-like grace and singularly personal insight.

Dave Marsh coedits Rock and Rap Confidential. marsh6@optonline.net