geoMp3 of The Week: Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam”
Last week’s track was the gloomy, haunting “Strange Fruit,” performed by Billie Holiday. It reminded me of this week’s track, which is much more up front with its bad-ass indictment of the shenanigans going on in the 1960s. (And by ’shenanigans’ I mean the deflating murders of Medgar Evers in Jackson, MS and four little kids in Birmingham.) It’s “Mississippi Goddam” by Nina Simone and it’s both a kick-ass song and performance. It will sound a little like something out of Oklahoma! but…it ain’t. Over that 2/4 beat you’ll hear a woman raging about the crazy shit going down in a country that was way too old for such things.
Anyway, part of its inspiration comes from the murder of Medgar Evers, who was shot down in his own yard in Jackson. I have not seen Ghosts of Mississippi, but if I had directed it I would have Scorcesed up that mutha by playing this Simone track over a procedural scene of Evers routinely driving home, disembarking his car with a box full of shirts, then being shot dead. The song is full of hot, sweaty, Mississippi anger, and by the end of its 5 minutes there’s no mistaking it for some moon-eyed piece of garbage from Rodgers or Hammerstein.
The track is positioned at 2332 Margaret W Alexander Drive, Jackson, MS, the humble, sad, still-extant site of Evers’ slaying.
So it’s Nina Simone growling out “Mississippi Goddam” in 1964.
And the kml for all mp3s of the week.
