“Mississippi Goddam” by Nina Simone

Nina Simone wrote every word and note of "Mississippi Goddam" and later called it her first civil rights song. It came to her in under an hour, in a flood of fury, once 1963 had driven home what being black in America meant, and it surfaced in 1964 on Nina Simone in Concert, an album drawn from three Carnegie Hall shows she played earlier that year. That record was her first for the Dutch label Philips, and it's where her music turned hard toward politics.

She arranged it herself and leads from the piano, backed by Rudy Stevenson on guitar, Lisle Atkinson on double bass and Bobby Hamilton on drums, with all three chiming in on backing vocals. Alongside "Four Women" it ranks among her most famous protest songs, and in 2019 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.