On songs from In Concert such as “Pirate Jenny” and “Mississippi Goddam,” Nina Simone employs various vocal techniques such as varied dynamics, strained and raspy timbre, and a conflict between pitched and unpitched vocal inflections to work against the expectations of her audience. These vocal deliveries are supported by, or at times disconnected from, the instrumentation with Simone and her piano on the Carnegie Hall concert stage, specifically a small ensemble of bass, upright bass, drums and guitar.
This is an audio recording of the 1964 performance of “Pirate Jenny” featured on the live album In Concert. This YouTube video gives my reader the ability to interact with the music I analyze.
Anger seeps into Nina Simone’s vocal delivery and performance of the song “Pirate Jenny” in the form of varying dynamics and inflections. Appearing as the third track on In Concert, “Pirate Jenny” was created originally composed for Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 show The Threepenny Opera, first being introduced to Nina Simone in an adaptation at the Theatre de Lys in 1963 (Brun-Lambert 129). Supported in this case by the structure of the song itself, Nina Simone commands her audience, drawing them into the lyrical verses of the song which also act as complete phrases or ideas. These phrases are broken up by Simone’s intense growls and whispers, and maniacal laughs, detached from any sort of instrumentation. For example, each verse of the song grows as the narrative of the song progresses, becoming increasingly louder. By the end of the verse, Simone practically shouts over the instrumentation, paying less attention to the accuracy of her pitch and instead straining forward, seemingly unconstrained by the very structure of the song. To quote an example, the second to last verse of the song erupts with intensity as Simone’s vocal delivery becomes unstable, especially as she harshly strains out “And they’re chaining up people, and they’re bringing them to me, asking me, ‘Kill them now, or later?’” At this moment, just like the previous verses, the tempo of the song slows down until the textured instrumentation of piano and drums halts, leaving Simone’s raspy, biting delivery as the only thing to be heard. Exposed and raw, the Simone forces the audience to submit to the power of her voice along with the power of the song’s character Jenny. She then repeats the lyric, “Asking me! ‘Kill them now, or later?’” for the audience with enough intense inflection to affectively isolate and disorient the listener. On this track especially, Simone uses her voice sparingly, understanding the value of the silence between her threats as a source of tension. As biographer David Brun-Lambert urges, “Listen to Nina’s performance of ‘Pirate Jenny,’ above all, listen to the silences she creates between each of the death threats uttered by her character. No one in Carnegie Hall moved an inch” (Brun-Lambert 130-31). Overall, each verse invites the audience to listen to the story just for Simone to strip it away and turn her anger, in all its intensity, toward the audience itself. This extremely varied vocal delivery gives Nina Simone agency over her music because she is in full control of her audience’s reactions, whether they want to be along for the performance or not.
This is a video recording of a performance of “Mississippi Goddam,” live at the Antibes Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival in July of 1965, a little more than a year after the recording of In Concert. Although this is not the exact visual to match the audio recording of “Mississippi Goddam” from the 1964 album, it still exhibits the same unpredictable anger that serves to subvert her audience’s expectations.
Similar to its intentions on “Pirate Jenny,” the last song of the live album entitled “Mississippi Goddam” employs vocal techniques influenced by Nina Simone’s anger, specifically through varied dynamics and her strained vocal breaks at the top of her range. This performance of “Mississippi Goddam” in Carnegie Hall, the first live recording of the notable civil rights anthem, was politically inspired by race violence in the American south in 1963, specifically the death of activist Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama (Graines 42). The anger that Simone experiences after learning about these tragic injustices translates musically in “Mississippi Goddam” in the very form of the song itself.
During the performance that appears on In Concert specifically, Simone speaks directly to her audience, exclaiming “This is a showtune, but the show hasn’t been written for it, yet”. As Simone clearly acknowledges, the song exists within a “structural impossibility” that operates both lyrically and musically, this “impossibility” stemming from a contrast between the light theatricality of the arrangement and the intensely subjective vocal performance (Graines 32). Showtune-esque qualities, such as the song’s fast-paced tempo at approximately 159 BPM and the 2/4 time signature, establishes an upbeat instrumental performance that Simone undermines with an angered, subjective voice.
Dynamically, Nina Simone’s voice crescendos from piano to forte as the piano instrumentation during the chorus climbs along a g major scale. At the moment the piano reaches the climactic g major chord at the end of each chorus, Simone reaches her loudest, most strained exclamation of “Goddam!” She powers through this moment of each chorus by almost shouting the pitch, often breaking between the two syllables of the word, as if in disbelief of the constant, rapid struggles enumerated lyrically and experienced physically in the labor of her voice. The anger expressed in this moment of the song is not just a response to the immediate injustices of 1963 but is also taken out against her audience. For example, another performance method which serves to isolate the audience is the clear separation between herself (“me”) and those listening (“you”). The lyric “You’re all gonna die and die like flies” is not the only way Simone distances herself from the listener, since her bitter, shout-singing at this moment also creates an isolating, subjective effect. Furthermore, the sharp vocal inflection in this line on the consonants “d” and “f” contributes to the uninviting performance of the song. By analyzing the musicality of the song in relation to Nina Simone’s voice, her unpredictable anger expresses itself in response to two injustices: the racial injustice illustrated in the lyrics and her audience’s expectations, who are unmistakably under the control of Simone’s subjective performance.