Just a week after performing at the historically Black Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., supporting James Meredith’s March Against Fear, Nina Simone was on fire as she strode onstage to play for a very different audience at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 2, 1966.
Her interactions with the bourgeois New Englanders at Newport were hardly warm: In the middle of an acid-rinsed version of “Blues for Mama,” she dismisses them — “I guess you ain’t ready for that” — and later she hushes them: “Shut up, shut up.” But she pours every ounce of vitriol she’s got into the performance, especially on “Mississippi Goddam.” She’d first released the song in 1964, and two years later it felt as topical as ever.
Meredith had just been shot while marching across Mississippi, and unrest was overtaking redlined Black neighborhoods across the country.
At Newport, she amends one of the verses to address the oppression of Los Angeles’s Black community: “Alabama’s got me so upset/And Watts has made me lose my rest/Everybody knows about Mississippi, goddamn!” The entire Newport performance is now available for the first time as an album titled “You’ve Got to Learn.” It’s spellbinding, heartbreaking stuff, reminding us just how much Simone would still be lamenting today.
GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
Persons:
James Meredith’s, Nina Simone, strode, ”, —, she’s, ” She’d, Meredith, “ Alabama’s, Watts, It’s spellbinding, Simone, GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
Organizations:
Black Tougaloo College, Newport Jazz Festival, Englanders
Locations:
Jackson, Miss, Newport, “, Mississippi