Nina Simone was one of the most extraordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American music. She was the consummate musical storyteller, a griot as she would come to learn, who used her remarkable talent to create a legacy of liberation, empowerment, passion, and love through a magnificent body of works. Ms. Simone earned the moniker ‘High Priestess of Soul.’
After an apolitical upbringing in North Carolina, she experienced a gradual awakening to racial injustice, until the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers radicalized her for good. Only six months before the Medgar Evers shooting, she had declined an invitation to perform at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee-sponsored event at Carnegie Hall.
But when four young black girls were killed in an infamous Birmingham church bombing later in 1963, Simone was moved to write one of her signature songs and a seminal protest anthem, “Mississippi Goddam,” which was banned in some southern states. From that point she became a fixture at civil rights gatherings, and her anger only deepened as the decade wore on.
In her memoir, I Put a Spell on You, she called the King assassination “the traditional white American tactic for getting rid of black leaders it couldn’t suppress in any other way.” The immediate aftermath was “a time for bitterness.” Simone’s sympathies were for the country’s urban rioters.
For years, Nina felt there was much about the way that she made her living that was less then appealing. In I Put A Spell on You she explains her initial reluctance to perform material that was tied to the Civil Rights Movement.
“Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning. And until songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ just burst out of me, I had musical problems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half 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 it stripped the dignity away from the people it was trying to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument and with ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ I realized there was no turning back.”