Behind the Song: Mississippi Goddam

Early morning on June 12, 1963, shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s Civil Rights Address, activist Medgar Evers was shot through the back in the driveway of his own home. Evers was returning from meeting NAACP lawyers and officials. He was taken to the hospital, where he later died. 

One afternoon, on September 15, 1963, four young black girls were killed due to a white supremacist terror attack, which would later be known as the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing. 

Nina Simone’s revolutionary song, “Mississippi Goddam,” was inspired by the horrific events of 1963. Simone turned her rage into a piece that fought against acts of violence and oppression against Black communities.

“Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning,” Simone recorded in her autobiography I Put A Spell On You. “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.”

She further explained, “At first, I tried to make myself a gun. I gathered some materials. I was going to take one of them out, and I didn’t care who it was,” Simone said after learning about the Birmingham bombing. “Then Andy, my husband at the time, said to me, ‘Nina, you can’t kill anyone. You are a musician. Do what you do.’ When I sat down the whole song happened. I never stopped writing until the thing was finished.”

Listing three major Civil Rights battleground states, her lyrics read, “Alabama’s gotten me so upset / Tennessee made me lose my rest / And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.” However, musically the song was upbeat and playful with the audience’s patter during the live recording, almost giving them a breath before talking more about boycotts, injustice, and the lack of equality present. 

She composed “Mississippi Goddam” in under an hour, with her frustration turning into an anthem about oppression against black communities. Simone sings, “Picket lines, school boycotts/ They try to say it’s a communist plot/ All I want is equality/ For my sister, my brother, my people, and me.” Further lines read, “Yes, you lied to me all these years/You told me to wash and clean my ears.”