Nina Simone in Concert (1964), the artist's first Philips album, is equally compelling for its musical and political content. Although Simone revisits two songs from her Bethlehem debut-- "I Loves You,
Porgy" and the African-inflect ed "Plain Gold Ring"-- and revives the pensive Willard Robison ballad "Don't Smoke in Bed," her concern on the most celebrated tracks is racial injustice. The album's cover announces Simone's severity; the smiling face that adorned her Colpix albums is replaced by a stern scowl. She shrewdly transports the combative Brecht-Weill Blitzstein "Pirate Jenny," sung by Lotte Lenya in The Threepenny Opera, from the backstreets of London to a
dockside hotel in the Ameri can South. Echoing Duke Ellington's exuberant "Jump for Joy," the rollicking "Old Jim Crow," which Simone co-authored, anticipates and celebrates the end of racial
discrimination. "Go Limp" is a parodic folk song about an i dealistic young woman's political and sexual liberation during a freedom march. Simone's composition "Mississippi Goddam"-- an
incongruously buoyant two-beat expression of outrage which the singer-pianist observes is "a showtune but the sh ow hasn't been written for it yet"-- ends the concert on a note of sulfuric defiance. ("This whole country is full of lies/You all gonna die and die like flies.") "Mississippi Goddam" became an anthem for a generation of young bl ack people determined to shake off the yoke of oppression.
Joel E. Siegel
City Paper
Washington, D.C.
Comments to Mauro Boscarol