Mississippi Goddam

“Mississippi Goddam” is one of iconic jazz musician’s Nina Simone’s most controversial tracks, due to Simone labelling the song as her “first civil rights song”. From her 1964 album “Nina Simone in Concert”, “Mississippi Goddam” was written and composed solely by Simone in under an hour, live at Carnegie Hall. The song captures Simone’s response to the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi; as well as the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four black children. When the track was released as a single, it was banned in large portions of the US, due to having the word ‘Goddam’ in the title. In the biographical film “What Happened, Miss Simone”, there was footage of boxes of records of the track being destroyed in places. “Mississippi Goddam” was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”.

There is no official music video for the track, however there is a YouTube upload by a user named “Aaron Overfield” in February 2013, where Simone is performing the track live in Antibes in July 1965. As of September 2019, it has over 1.7 million views.

Release Date: 1964

Songwriter/s: Nina Simone

Composer/s: Nina Simone

Producer/s: Hal Mooney

Label: Philips Records