Reservas técnicas

Simone’s three-year “Philips period”—her years recording for the Philips label — began in 1964. Over the next decade, she publicly denounced American treatment of blacks, and much of her musical repertoire turned explicitly political. Her first album for Philips, In Concert, was recorded at Carnegie Hall in March of 1964. It included three of the songs of troubled romantic relationships she was known for—“I Loves You Porgy,” “Don’t Smoke in Bed,” and “Plain Gold Ring.” But it also included four expressly political offerings: the scathing, though rhythmically upbeat, “Mississippi Goddam,” which not surprisingly had difficulty with distribution in the South; “Old Jim Crow,” which she had cowritten, taking the songs of others and turning them into her own singular expression of the black experience; “Pirate Jenny,” a number from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (1928), which Simone relocates from London to the American South and in which she hisses, snarls, and vows revenge; and Dr. Alex Comfort’s folk song “Go Limp,” which she rearranged into a tale of the violence and threat of rape that went hand in hand with protest. One reviewer rightly calls In Concert

“the most personal album that Simone issued during her stay on Philips in the mid-60s.” (Erlewhine, 670)

With the release of this album, Nina Simone had frankly and firmly announced herself as a gutsy musical proponent of civil rights. But by then she already had developed a reputation among civil rights workers by playing at fundraising events, appearing at marches, and performing for activists right on the frontlines in the South. In April 1963, she played at a mixed-race benefit concert at Miles College. A newspaper claimed that

“her ululating rendition of Oscar Brown Jr.’s ‘Brown Baby’ had The Birmingham bombing. One of the first events to really activate the civil rights movement was the bombing of the 16^thStreet Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. The bombing of the church, whose congregation was predominantly black, killed four schoolgirls and outraged activists who were already dissatisfied with the treatment of African-American people in the South.

Simone wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in response to this bombing, and her song easily became an anthem of the movement and one of her signature pieces.

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thousands cheering to the skies.” (Ward, 301) She also performed at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) benefit in April 1964 at Carnegie Hall, and that June, she headlined at an SNCC “Freedom Concert” in Westbury, New York. The Westbury concert was to raise money for the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, an attempt by four civil rights groups to increase voter registration and establish a black political presence in Mississippi. By that summer,

“Mississippi Goddam” had become an anthem for the activists.

“I mean everybody in the Movement just sort of took that as a tribute to the Mississippi project,” said Stanley Wise of the SNCC. (Ward, 301) Simone’s music, and her formidable presence, continued to empower and energize the civil rights movement throughout the 1960s. The singer Bernice Johnson Reagon said, “Simone helped people to survive. . . . When you heard her voice on a record it could get you up in the morning.

. . . She could sing anything, it was the sound she created. It was the sound of that voice and piano. . . . Nina Simone’s sound captured the warrior energy that was present in the people. The fighting people.” (Ward, 302)

In the spring of 1965, Simone decided at the last minute to play for the marchers walking from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Then she returned the following summer to perform for another march, even though she hadn’t been scheduled. Later that year, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) honored Simone with a special award for her efforts on their behalf. H. Rap Brown, an SNCC leader and friend of Simone’s, called her “the singer of the black revolution because there is no other singer who sings real protest songs about the race situation.” (Ward, 302)

Throughout this time, Simone voiced her opinions to the press, never hesitant about showing her disapproval about certain race-related matters. In her autobiography, Simone described an incident in which she saw an off-Broadway play featuring two black actors in the cast. She felt that their roles were “insulting to black people,” so in the middle of the show she went to the stage

and told them so. She wrote, “When injustice stared me in the face I struck out fiercely, without taking time to consider the implications. . . . I was not cold and intellectual about campaign-ing, I was intuitive.” (I Put a Spell on You, 97)

During this period, Simone counted Stokely Carmichael and the South African musician Miriam Makeba among her friends and admirers. When Simone first went to Philadelphia to meet Carmichael, he singled her out in the audience and hailed her as the true singer of the civil rights movement. She also met Louis Farrakhan, who went on to become a leading voice in the racial separatist movement in the United States. It was during this time that Simone realized and affirmed her own thoughts on separatism: “In the white man’s world the black man would always lose out, so the idea of a separate black nation, whether it was in America or in Africa, made sense.”

(I Put a Spell on You, 100)