Mississippi Goddam - Live In New York/1964

A classically trained pianist, Nina Simone wrote hundreds of songs, but rarely put words to them. When she did, it was often to speak out against racism and injustice. She wrote this song in response to the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi on June 12, 1963, and also to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four black girls on September 15, 1963. Simone said in I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters and Their Craft, "When I heard about the bombing of the church in which the four little black girls were killed in Alabama, I shut myself up in a room and that song happened. Medgar Evers had been recently slain in Mississippi. 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. 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."

Simone was born in South Carolina in 1933, and got so frustrated with America that she left the country in 1969, living in several countries the rest of her life, including Liberia, Switzerland and France.

In the March 24, 1986 issue of Jet, Nina Simone said that her protest songs hurt her career. She further added that, of all the protest songs she released, "Mississippi Goddam" probably hurt her the worst.