The Songs of Nina Simone

Black musical expression, especially during the Civil Rights Movement, is an expression centered around protest and resistance, and one of the most outstanding members of this tradition of black protest music is Nina Simone. 
According to Simone, her first protest song which she called her “first civil rights song” was Mississippi Goddamn which she wrote herself. Simone released this song after the murder of the civil rights leader Medger Evans and also in response to a racially motivated bombing that left four black children dead. Her courage in releasing such an anthem in a time when protest and asking for equality resulted in the loss of life, such as what Medger Evans and many others experienced, is immediately striking. Another very interesting thing about this song is the lyric, “Keep on sayin' 'go slow'...to do things gradually would bring more tragedy. I find this interesting because it challenges the argument at the time that things would slowly get better, that arguing for incremental measures would be more beneficial than protests and the rhetoric that Civil Rights leaders, especially Malcolm X, were employing.  Through this song, Simone protests not only against the oppression that was rampant in that time but also notions of changing race relations which she thought were counterproductive, or perhaps even harmful.
 Furthermore, I also think it is important to state here the difference that having one’s emotions and thoughts articulated in a speech has as compared to having them articulated in a song. The importance and impact of the speeches and the interviews of Civil Rights leaders cannot be ignored or downplayed. The consequences of their oration are immense. But Nina Simone’s rendition of “Strange Fruit” evokes such a harrowing image and such unmitigated feelings of tragedy and injustice that one is left shaken. Especially when she sings;
“Black bodies
Swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin'
From the poplar trees”
The intensity of feeling that Simone is able to create is striking and lasting, and it can be argued that this gives voice to a particular and specific feeling of helplessness experienced by African-Americans of that time, and by articulating this feeling, Simone is able to allow her listeners to articulate it as well.
While Simone’s song, “I’m feeling good” is not a protest song, I thought it merited mention here. Throughout this course, we have talked repeatedly about this idea of going home, of an after, and I feel that this song which talks of
It's a new dawn
It's a new day
It's a new life for me, yeah
And this old world, is a new world
And a bold world, for me
also puts forth this hopeful idea of a new bold world for “me”, which can be interpreted to be a stand-in for those suffering under the white man.
What is striking then, ultimately, about Nina Simone is not only the particular intensity and clear emotional articulation that she brings to her protest songs but also the fact that she sang about the after and while her protest songs, it can be argued, are aimed at the oppression she and others faced, in “Feeling Good”, Simone sings to all those that face such oppression and shows them a new day wherein they all will have a new life.

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