Nina Simone and Billie Holiday are two of the greats. Matriarchs in a long line of enlightened performers. They are remembered for the fire in their bellies as much as the warmth in their hearts, and embody the ability female jazz singers’ have to deliver clarity on the social issues peculiar to the black female experience.
“This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.” With these words Nina Simone opens a live recording of her bouncy vaudeville parody “Mississippi Goddamn.” The sit down dinner crowd chuckles politely back at her. Simone, at times deeply sarcastic and at others brazen and sincere was an infamously difficult performer for the audience to please. Keeping up with her mood was their challenge, to pay close attention, sit down and shut up. Or else, stand up, why don’t you give a little something? Sing along, by all means, but for God’s sake hit the right note.
“Mississippi Goddamn” starts in a lilting “A Tisket-A-Tasket” style with, “California’s got me so upset…,” but we soon learn this is powerful anti-southern racism protest; no trivial ditty. It was written in the heat of rage on hearing of the KKK bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Mississippi, and the violent death of four young girls on their way to a sermon in the church. This is a song of fear, frustration and above all hatred. On learning of the bombing, she broke down and tried to build herself a gun to seek revenge. But, as Nina says in a later interview; “I knew nothing about killing, and I did know about music.”
Nina Simone – “Mississippi Goddamn” (Live recording)
After 1964, her music became her weapon, and she would record much civil rights music over the next decade. But, although songs like “Mississippi Goddamn” may appear a knee jerk reaction protest song (she wrote it in a couple of manic hours at the piano) it was to prove a powerful and decisive weapon in her arsenal as a political activist. It was canonised into Simone’s repertoire, and was most famously heard by 40,000 at the Montgomery March, solidifying her voice with that of Black Power.
Musicians were called to task as the Civil Rights Movement gathered pace. This was an era where jazz and politics were one and the same and music was not simply the soundtrack to dissent, it was the instrument of change. Simone entered a prolonged attack on racist and sexist American values throughout the sixties, building a African American cultural idiom she called “Black Classical.” Her classical piano training allowed her to play the tortured artiste, and for that she did not fit with the trajectory of the jazz narrative; she wasn’t swinging, she wasn’t bopping, she was doing her own thing, indeed rejecting the word “jazz” altogether as a white racial stereotype.
Nina Simone – “Mississippi Goddamn”
By the mid-1970s, the Civil Rights Movement in her eyes a failure, her beloved father dead and her finances in tatters, Simone took up a nomadic life in Europe, and wouldn’t record again until 1978. Her isolation was evident in (and in no small part caused by) her first protest song: “Bet you thought I was kidding?” she asks the crowd, now silent and taught, after the second verse of “Mississippi Goddamn”, before delivering the song’s most accusatory lyrics: “This whole country is full of lies, you’re all gonna die and die like flies.” This was not time for subtlety.
Simone’s frustration lay with the perceived ineffectiveness of Dr. King’s brand of non-violent protest and “going slow.” Beyond that, Simone claimed her female sexuality to be deeply entwined with the colour of her skin, not the lesser of two evils to be set on the back burner. Her femininity was critical to her message and stage presence, and she sort to associate women with the male dominated Black Power movement, where women were seen not as leaders, but assistants to the cause.
Harriet Jacobs, the first black female voice in America and a freed slave wrote in her autobiography; “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.” She was speaking of course, of rape, an institutionalised method of control (and economy) in southern slave owners. This spectre still hung over the singers mentioned here. The female performer, the object of a controlling male gaze, deflects some of this heat back onto the audience if she is skilful and strong, but at an expense; Billie Holiday would struggle with abusive relationships her entire life, narcotics finally proving the cruellest of masters, while Simone’s bi-polar disorder, diagnosed only late in life, would distract her brilliant mind into paranoia and reliance on manipulative men.
Violence was something both Holiday and Simone would struggle to keep out of their lives. To be a female performer and to sing anything other than a bittersweet love song meant trouble. Holiday drank, cursed and fought like a man, because she had learned this is how men (particularly sailors) got what they wanted. She had been a prostitute in a Baltimore quayside whorehouse from age twelve and she knew the dark depths of men’s souls far too young.
So, to look at Simone’s predecessor and to assess the success of her protest song “Strange Fruit” is to go back to a time when black women were disenfranchised still further, and to make a political statement of any kind was all the more remarkable.
Billie Holiday – “Strange Fruit”
Although initially only performed at Café Society, the left leaning nightclub in New York, “Strange Fruit” would regularly land Holiday in hot water when it was finally performed on tour. Holiday threatened to resign from a tour after racial abuse was hurled at after one performance, leading to some venues stipulating that she could not sing the song at all. Holiday’s management started to include the right to specifically perform “Strange Fruit” in her contracts, writing it into her act. She came to own the song, and equally, the song came to own her. It took a hold of Holiday and became synonymous with her character, and she guarded it viciously, threatening Josh White with a knife when he sang it.
“Strange Fruit” was carefully orchestrated by her manager John Hammond for maximum impact as an understated drama and performances of it are shrouded in mythology. Holiday would perform it at the end of the night under a single silhouette spotlight, and no drinks were to be sold during the song; there would be no encores.
“Strange Fruit” could stand up for itself without visual embellishment and it is the unexpected here which sticks the knife in and gives the song its power. Almost unthinkable that a young black girl who normally sang of a broken heart could choke such words out. The non-narrative poem structure paints a gruesome image, with no respite from the horrors of lynching, the scent of sweet and fresh scent of magnolia only heightening the scene. This was the intention. This issue had too long been swept under the carpet and ignored by society, and the lyrics have no protagonist, and allow the listener to be a witness to this crime.
Simone covered “Strange Fruit” connecting the two women across the reach of time, bringing it into the contemporary Civil Rights Movement and renewing the protest. To paraphrase Josh White when Holiday held him at knife point; “We will keep singing this song until we don’t need to anymore.”
Illustration by Ella Plevin.
