Nina Simone — 'Mississippi Goddam' and Carnegie Hall

Nina Simone premiered 'Mississippi Goddam' — her furious, devastating response to the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four Black girls on 15 September 1963 — before a live audience, and recorded it live at Carnegie Hall at 881 7th Avenue in New York City in 1964. The recording that appeared on 'Nina Simone in Concert' (1964) captured the song exactly as she performed it: as a sardonic, barely contained declaration of rage delivered in the theatrical form of a show tune ('This is a show tune / but the show hasn't been written for it yet'), the form's bright surface making the fury underneath more devastating rather than less.

Carnegie Hall was a central performance space in Nina Simone's career and the live recording made there is one of the definitive documents of the relationship between American popular music and the civil rights movement. Simone had been a child prodigy in Tryon, North Carolina, trained as a classical pianist and aspiring to be the first Black concert pianist to perform at Carnegie Hall — an aspiration that was redirected when she was rejected by the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 1951, a rejection she attributed to racial discrimination. She became instead a jazz and blues singer whose classical training gave her music a harmonic and technical sophistication that set it apart from her contemporaries.

Carnegie Hall continues to operate as one of the world's premier concert venues and hosts performances year-round. The Nina Simone recording made there — and the extraordinary performance it documents — can be heard on 'Nina Simone in Concert.' The song itself was banned by some Southern radio stations and returned as a reminder of its country's unresolved history at moments of racial crisis throughout the following decades. Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon; she took her stage name to hide her musical career from her family.