Everybody Knows It
In response to the four girls killed in a church bombing, to the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evans, and to the prejudices both herself and her compatriots suffered, Nina Simone spent an hour composing and writing a four minute and forty-one seconds-long song titled Mississippi Goddam. Encapsulated in this song is the passion and fury of a woman tired of waiting for civil rights to be afforded her and her compatriots. Simone no longer felt comfortable waiting for that which the nonviolence movement promised to bring; she wanted immediate and, if necessary, coerced change. She was no longer able to be silent and hopeful on the issue. Simone calls out everyone on the matter of the racist institutions in place. “Everybody knows,” she exclaims, urging her audience to stop the madness. Through this song she asks how the world can idly stand by whilst young girls and boys and men and women alike are all under constant attack by those who believe that such an arbitrary thing as culture or skin colour defines one’s worth and place in the world. Simone’s outcry exhorts the world to pick up the pace in its dispensing of equal rights for all. She wants those who believe in universal civil rights to be more abrasive in their tactics, to push harder and faster.
However passionate and infuriated Simone was when creating Mississippi Goddam, and however far she seeks to galvanise the audience to go in order to fulfil the goals of those fighting for civil rights, her tact and skill belie. The song itself does not immediately come across as militant. In fact, it has a nice and gentle melody, upbeat and friendly as a show tune. She reflects upon this quality in the song itself, remarking, “This is a show tune / But the show hasn’t been written for it, yet.” Throughout the recording Simone calls to her audience, asking them, “Can’t you see it? / Can’t you feel it?” She does not understand why they cannot, for racism and its consequences, that which Simone refers to as “it,” is everywhere, and so obvious. And the audience, more likely than not, does not, at least immediately, comprehend the magnitude of her question.
With the questions regarding the audience’s awareness of racism and its consequences, the audience is forced to come to a certain set of conclusions. Simone asks first if the audience is capable (“Can’t you see it?’ / Can’t you feel it?”) of experiencing racism. If the audience member is white, there is a pretty high chance that this is unlikely, and that their answer to Simone’s questions is, “No.” Why, then, can whites not experience racism? What about the balance of power or what institutions are in place keeps whites from experiencing racism? If the audience member is either partially or not at all white, there is a high chance that they have indeed experienced racism, and thus can answer with a resounding, “Yes,” in which case they are already alongside Simone and thus complicit in her rage and agony, without perhaps even realising it. The second phase of questioning considers whether the audience is allowing itself (“Why don’t you see it? / Why don’t you feel it?”) to experience or acknowledge racism. If one affirmatively answered the first question, they have not the need to reply to the second, for it was implicitly and previously affirmed. Those who answered negatively to the first question, however, after having been informed that “everyone knows about Mississippi,” must answer the second query.
Through these questions, Simone pushes for accountability regarding the maintained institution of racism. If “everybody knows about” it, and the events to which Simone is responding are understood to be horrible events, why is racism maintained? She asks, “Can’t you see” the horrors? “Can’t you feel” the despair? If not, why? How is it possible? Simone also charges those who are aware, and act in the name of civil rights, to do so with greater urgency and vitality. She complains about the ‘Do it slow’ mentality, claiming that it has been around since cotton picking, and continued through the marches and sit-ins and other pacifistic acts of civil disobedience. “Do things gradually,” Simone scorns, “But bring more tragedy.” The solution Simone offers regarding the generally slow pace of gaining civil rights is radicalisation. To those who fight alongside her, she instructs, “Just try to do your very best / Stand up, be counted with all the rest.” No more waiting. No more patience. To those who would keep from Simone and her compatriots their rights, she demands them vehemently, “You don’t have to live next to me / Just give me my equality.” Demand, command, and take a stand.
This methodology contrasts greatly with that implied by a song which came out earlier the same year. Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come offers not the urgency nor radicalisation Simone’s Mississippi Goddam offers. Rather, it reflects upon the struggles Cooke has undergone and offers hope and faith as a solution. “But I know a change is gonna come,” Cooke assures, “oh yes it will.” For Cooke, change is inevitable. His song is in response to a more explicitly personal experience of racism. He and his band were turned away from a Holiday Inn in Shreveport, Louisiana, and Cooke chose to fight with the innkeeper, an act which ended with Cooke and his band imprisoned. About a month later, Cooke had written the song. According to Peter Guralnick, a specialist on Cooke, A Change is Gonna Come is the first song Cooke wrote which outright dealt with infractions of civil rights (NPR). Why, coming from a personal experience, was Cooke not more incensed in his song-writing as Simone was in hers?
Cooke was often highly aware of his audience, preferring to stay closer to his roots in gospel in order to keep those he had gained during his early years, despite his success as a crossover artist (NPR). Simone, on the other hand, was more focused on her needs as an artist than those who experienced her art. Having gained her early notoriety in night clubs and been spurned by those she felt would welcome her, as exemplified by her rejection from the Curtis Institute of Music, Simone had less reason to care for what her fans thought of her music (Chandler). If they concurred with her art and its message, then they would stick around, and that was worth more to Simone than playing music agreeable to the masses. Simone’s music itself was an act of resistance against institutions; she refused to be pigeonholed into a single branch of music, instead drawing upon the many genres she encountered and absorbed into her own voice and style (Feldstein 1355). Simone made use of American show tune musical aesthetic to bring social issues to light in Mississippi Goddam. Although the rhythm itself is upbeat and engaging, the subject at hand is grave and despairing. Simone thus carves out a space in seemingly lighthearted conversation for the pertinent and heartbreaking consequences of racism that are otherwise largely absent from the genre. This deliberately jarring contrast further highlights the issues Simone seeks to bring to light (Brooks 187). No longer can those who listen to show tunes as an escape from such serious matters as civil rights do so, for Simone has brought news of her torment to their attention, in their language.
It may also be pointed out that whilst Cooke was a crossover in terms of genre, Simone, not fitting within a particular genre at the time, was a cultural crossover. Although she was seen as being African American by her fans, it was not solely Americans who loved Simone, but the English and French as well. She was an artist who was authentic (a term delineating true jazz artists from otherwise) not because of the music she played, but because of her skill and prowess (Feldstein 1357-1358). She was taken in by the French because she had the Parisian attitude, worldly conscious and transcending arbitrary boundaries at will. Her consciousness, spreading over the entire world, taking on the problems of those universal struggles derived from equality, gave her an edge that Cooke could not take for himself. With her fieriness and dash, Simone could take an audience’s hearts and implant in them the same troubles she herself had swarming within hers.
Another distinction between Cooke and Simone is, like the most interesting aspects of jazz, more implied than explicit. Cooke, alongside other artists like Ray Charles and, until a bit later in his career, James Brown, focused on lifting spirits and promoting either greater spirituality or sensuality. They promoted good feelings and times, as if their spirits were untarnished by the struggles and burdens of their lives, whether it be romantic challenges or those created by the institution of American racism. Simone, however, perhaps being driven more by her art than by a need to share her art, elected otherwise. Sure, it might be easy to presume that since Simone’s career thrived from her renditions of jazz and blues songs, her music followed suit, but to convincingly perform such improvisational styles as blues and jazz, and with the theatricality and mastery Simone performed them, there had to be a deeper darkness to the artist herself. What burden might Simone have upon her shoulders that Brown, Charles, and even Cooke did not? What might have goaded from her the impertinence and impatience others did not exude in their music?
Simone struggled more than Cooke, Brown, and Charles because she had to experience the prejudices against women that they, being men, never had to suffer. Simone had to worry about her place as both an African American and a woman, a complex of which Cooke and the rest only had one structure to consider. While Cooke may have had to overcome racism to be taken seriously, Simone had to prove herself twicefold. She, an artist, wished to be considered as valid as any man of any race, and had to fight to ensure that she was. As any proper classical musician, which Simone truly was, Simone expected that she would be respected by her audience; they would attend her concerts orderly, well-dressed, and with the intent to listen to what she had to share (Feldstein 1358). When her audience failed to meet her expectations, she reprimanded them for it, something potentially dangerous for artists to do.
Her vehemence and explicit expectations further presented Simone as a proper, true musician, and thus validated her performances and art. This was something Cooke is not known to have done, nor to have had to do. In patriarchal societies such as American society, women are oft relegated as second to men, innately. The fact that it was only a decade before Simone was born, 1920, when women earned suffrage, and that women still earn less than men for the same work, exemplifies this fact. One might also consider such songs as Ray Charles’ I Got a Woman, in which Charles croons about having a woman who lends him money when he needs it, who “saves her lovin’ just for” him, and who knows her place, “right there in her home.” These are not lyrics uplifting women, but putting them in their place, as if freedoms are meant to be enjoyed by men only. Although the civil rights movement pushed for, theoretically, equality for all, there still were gender disparities which remained largely unaddressed. And Simone, in Mississippi Goddam, amongst other songs, explicitly and energetically brought these disparities to the forefront of the conversation about civil rights.
She does this through the very act of swearing (Brooks 188-189). Although it seems a minor curse, “goddam,” at the time it was a very serious offense. Primarily, swearing as a woman was unladylike and thus out of character. She was being disruptive in this manner as well as using a term which essentially spits in the face of religion itself. The institutions against which Simone fought were known to use religion and propriety as validations for their racist and horrendous behaviours. The word “goddam” acknowledges, disregards, and thus challenges both. It brings further attention to the contents of her song; from the commencement, the song is explicitly provocative. It forces the audience to understand that the song itself is meant to be heard, and will be, whether one wishes to pay attention or otherwise (Brooks 188).
Simone further rallies against the use of propriety to protest by observing that she is losing faith as a result of merely waiting. She goes from “Somebody say a prayer” to “I’ve even stopped believing in prayer” in the span of two verses. As women have been for a long while held as the religious and moral centres of society, that Simone so swiftly departs from this model implies an overwhelming desire for drastic and radical change. No longer will Simone sit and contemplate and protest in silence. She will speak out, and loudly, and protest with a vehemence and fervour before unutilised. No longer will Simone participate in the way mandated by those who believe a woman’s place should be dictated.
Of these sentiments Mississippi Goddam is a violent declaration (Brooks 189). The explicit disregard for rules which an institution has put into place is itself a violent act. The song rejects notions regarding the subject matter of show tunes. It contains a swear as part of the title, as well as part of the refrain; this curse word is sung by a woman whose passions exude through the music, through both her voice and piano. The song is an exclamation of animosity; it commands its listeners to understand themselves and their part in the racialized political scheme. It forces its audience to understand whether it helps or is hindered by the racist policies and institutions in place. It forces the audience to recognise which side it stands on, and what it should do depending upon its position. It is an act of violent protest, which, to Simone, is the solution to the delay in social justice being served.
She asks the audience to be ruthless in its demands, to thrive though its restlessness, but she does something else as well, albeit perhaps unintentionally. When one is revered, one’s actions are considered to be worth emulating. That is, those who revere Christ wish to, in theory, act as Christ-like as possible; those who revere Malala Yousafzai or Dean Koontz wish to act in some way like Yousafzai or Koontz, largely because they find these figures to be great, or have something great about them. There is a positive connection between those who are revered and those who revere them. By writing, performing, and recording an angered outcry at injustice, Nina Simone was making it okay for those who heard and resonated with her voice to feel what they felt. Outrage was validated. Anger was validated. Sorrow was validated. And these feelings towards racism, being validated, enabled solidarity between the artist and their fans, and thus between their fans and the movement to which the artist applied themselves.
Through music, then, Simone not only galvanised those who were hesitant to do so, but made it okay for successive groups to believe in violent protest. Those who were tired of waiting, who felt softer, quieter means of protest were exhausted and trite, who believed that there needed to be more active forms of activism, who wanted to use their hands and stomp their feet, who wanted to be heard and seen and felt in the streets, all were validated and represented by Simone’s song. They were given a warcry, a call-to-arms, and a respite, all in one.
About thirty years after its creation, all the purpose Simone gave to singing Mississippi Goddam were effectively negated by the self-same artist. “There is no reason to singing those songs,” Simone laments. “Nothing is happening” (Chandler). Perhaps Simone was realising that the same injustices that the United States claimed to have broken down and solved had not in actuality been fixed, but were remodelled. Perhaps, retrospectively, Simone was realising that the songs she had sung and crafted were, albeit transformative in terms of the methodology of the civil rights movement, only echoing the strife and suffering of her predecessors. The placelessness of escaped slaves, perhaps, resounds in Simone’s Mississippi Goddam (“Where am I going? / What am I doing? / I don’t know”). “Picket lines / School boycotts / They try to say it’s a communist plot” echoes the branding of Abolitionist rhetoric as treachery, and runaways as fugitives by the Fugitive Slave Act. Simone’s list of injustices references the times of Reconstruction (“Washing the windows… Picking the cotton”) as if the tactics of social injustice had not changed, but were rebranded. It is only after watching the world for thirty years, living through the civil rights movement, that Simone realises, or admits, that almost nothing has changed but the craftiness of the institution.
Works Cited
Brooks, Daphne A. “Nina Simone's Triple Play.” Callaloo, vol. 34, no. 1, 2011, pp. 176–197., doi:10.1353/cal.2011.0036.
Chandler, Adam. “What Happened to Nina Simone?” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 27 June 2015, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/06/nina-simone-and-mississippi-goddam/396923/. Accessed 17 Mar. 2017.
Feldstein, Ruth. “‘I Don't Trust You Anymore’: Nina Simone, Culture, and Black Activism in the 1960s.” Journal of American History, vol. 91, no. 4, Mar. 2005, pp. 1349–1379., doi:10.2307/3660176.
Staff, NPR. “Sam Cooke And The Song That 'Almost Scared Him'.” NPR, NPR, 1 Feb. 2014, www.npr.org/2014/02/01/268995033/sam-cooke-and-the-song-that-almost-scared-him. Accessed 17 Mar. 2017.