I am working with the Nina Simone Foundation on a project to honor her legacy, I would love to speak to you about it…please email directly and I will give you my direct number.

Thanks again,

Anthony R Page
Nina Simone Foundation

I’m a First Nation/Indigenous/Canadian Indian male from the West Coast of Canada that also practiced self-control, respect and politeness in the face of disrespect and stupidity. Didn’t want to feed in on their persistent stereotypes.

Living that way in a consistantly cruel world is stressful, so I decompressed listening to people that see the world the way I do. That felt the frustrations I did and expressed them in a form that stopped the blood from boiling for a while. I love and respect the courage these artists have in speaking truth to injustice.

I grew up listening to Buffy St Marie, Public Enemy, Aretha, Robert Cray, Robert Johnson, Rage Against the Machine, Sinead O’Connor, Ani Di Franco, and many more. I’ve seen Nina Simone’s name before, but until today never heard her sing. What an experience. I want to listen to everything she recorded now.

In looking for other info on the ‘net I found this at Dear Kitty:

http://dearkitty.blogsome.com/2009/04/13/protest-songs-on-racism-in-north-america/

Again thanks for the link to Ms Simone.

Thank you.

I can’t wait to read more of this new series. What a great idea!

I agree with you on Pirate Jenny; I got chills the first time I heard it, and I’m not the target of her anger. And honestly, I would not be on board with the kind of revolution she was advocating. I think nonviolence is stupid when people are attacking you — if somebody hits me I hit back. But Nina took it a step further. There’s an amusing (?) anecdote in her autobiography about how when she heard about Medgar Evers, she went out to her shed and basically started trying to cobble together a gun out of spare parts. Her friends talked her down, and she laughed about it, and I laughed too. At first. But then I thought about it and was like, holy shit, she was about to go Columbine.

Then again, I decided that was too extreme an interpretation. Hopefully it was more like a black woman taking off her earrings, the universal (well, for us) declaration of Time To Whoop Some Ass.

Just, uh, with a gun. Huh. Well. Glad they talked her down.

I’ve heard her version of Strange Fruit. I’ve heard most of her music, actually, which was why I was so shocked when I heard this rendition of Pirate Jenny; nearly all her other “protest songs” were passive resistance, with the exception of Mississippi Goddamn, and even its line (“you’re all gonna die and die like flies”) is passive — no statement of how this death would occur, or who might cause it. This was the first one where she straight-up said, let’s kill them all.

I think this kind of anger has a useful purpose, though, even for white people, which is — it’s cathartic. A safety valve. Better, and healthier, for Nina to sing about killing white people than for her to actually get a gun and go do so. (AFAICT, the gun incident coincided with her writing “Mississippi Goddamn” and remixing “Pirate Jenny,” so she may very well have channeled her rage into this safer outlet.) Better for her audience to listen to this and vent some rage cheering, than vent it on real people. I also think it was crucial for white people of the time — remember, this was first sung at Carnegie Hall; I think the audience would’ve been mostly wealthy, white, and influential — to realize just how angry black people were. Just how ready to blow. I think that songs like this, and the warning implicit in it, helped to push Kennedy into signing the Civil Rights Act.

I also suggest her version of Strange Fruit (for more haunting, less rageful) a contemplation of the time period. Oh hell, just listen to everything she ever performed, she’s just so astounding.