Mississippi Goddam

CTL-E-6097 · Work · song · 1964

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07318 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-6097.

"Mississippi Goddam" is a song written and performed by American singer and pianist Nina Simone, who later called it her first civil rights song. Released in 1964 on her album Nina Simone in Concert, drawn from recordings of three Carnegie Hall concerts earlier that year, the song was her first release for the Dutch label Philips Records and marked a more political turn in her recorded music. Simone composed it in less than an hour. The song captures her response to the racially motivated murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers in Mississippi and to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four Black children. She first performed it at the Village Gate nightclub in Greenwich Village, and shortly afterward in March 1964 at Carnegie Hall before a mostly white audience. The Carnegie Hall recording was released as a single and became an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement, while the song was banned in several Southern states and promotional singles were returned broken in half. In 2019 the Library of Congress selected it for the National Recording Registry.

The record

• Also known as: Mississippi Goddam (song)

Notes

Staged 2026-10-16 under CTL-GOV-006 (Scan Tail Wave 4 — 747 Program, Wave 11; fourth Scan Tail packet at the founder's 40-record size). Gate A (2026-10-16): no Mississippi Goddam entity in the live graph at 3,763 entities (exact / normalized / alias match + token containment; CLEAR). ID CTL-E-6097 free. No Work record for the song exists; Nina Simone's Person record (CTL-E-5234) does not home it. Supply: 747 Supply Ledger, Tier 4 — Scan Tail Wave 3 packet ordered reserve, position 12 of 35 (corpus-gap-candidates-2026-10-15.json ranked clean survivor #1561). The scan supplied the NAME STRING ONLY; no fact in this record is sourced to it (CTL-GOV-004). SCOPE GATE: PASS — Black America canon — a national civil-rights anthem rooted in Mississippi and Alabama events and a New York premiere; included in BCI-001 as movement music, not as a Chicago-origin work. Vital status: Not applicable — Work/song. Release facts instead: released in 1964 on Nina Simone in Concert (Philips Records), from Carnegie Hall recordings made earlier that year; first performed at the Village Gate nightclub in Greenwich Village before the March 1964 Carnegie Hall performance (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-10-16). STATISTICS — STATISTICS (sourced, dated): Released 1964 on Nina Simone in Concert, recorded live at Carnegie Hall, Philips Records (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-10-16); composed in less than an hour (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-10-16); selected by the Library of Congress for the National Recording Registry in 2019 (Wikipedia; GRAMMY.com dated March 20, 2019). No conflicting figures in the opened sources. MEDIA: photo HELD (Sleeve for the promotional release of the 'Mississippi Goddam' single, shown as the infobox image on the song's Wikipedia page — specific image for a later PHOTO-001 pass to verify; no license claimed. — named candidate only; file-level rights verification per CTL-PHOTO-001 still required; no license claimed); chart FILLED (charts/chart-ctl-e-6097-mississippi-goddam.svg); video FILLED (CTL Short 174 — staged on this Work record under the matching-entity rule; Link Map binding caveat carried in the media block); audio HELD (no rights-cleared matching-entity audio staged); map N/A (no address-based map spec earned). MEDIA LAYER (staged 2026-10-16; full per-asset PHOTO-001 records + embed specs in the packet's staged JSON, Drive packet folder): map = N/A (No address-based map spec earned under the packet standard for this record.) | visual_assets = HELD: | chart = FILLED (CTL-created chart (black / deep red / gold) built only from this record's sourced statistics and timeline fact) | video = FILLED (CTL-owned @culturetechlens YouTube Short whose subject is this song (matching-entity rule); catalog row and UR) | audio = HELD (No rights-cleared matching-entity audio staged.)

Relationships

• Nina Simone — authored by
  Wikipedia infobox and text: song written and performed by Nina Simone, songwriter/composer Nina Simone; Nina Simone is Person CTL-E-5234 per the brief's peer note

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Mississippi Goddam" (accessed 2026-10-16) — written and performed by Nina Simone; her first civil rights song; released 1964 on Nina Simone in Concert from Carnegie Hall recordings; Philips Records; first performed at Village Gate, then March 1964 at Carnegie Hall; response to murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church bombing; banned in several Southern states; Library of Congress National Recording Registry 2019 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Goddam (build store)
• GRAMMY.com, "Jay-Z, Nina Simone, Cyndi Lauper Among National Recording Registry Inductees" (dated March 20, 2019, accessed 2026-10-16) — Library of Congress class including Simone's 1964 single 'Mississippi Goddam' among recordings deemed culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant — https://www.grammy.com/news/jay-z-nina-simone-cyndi-lauper-among-national-recording-registry-inductees/ (primary source · build store)
• uDiscover Music, "Nina Simone's 'Mississippi Goddam' Previews Newly-Discovered Set" (accessed 2026-10-16) — Simone wrote the track, called it her first civil rights song, about the murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church bombing; first performed at Village Gate; released on Nina Simone In Concert LP of 1964 recorded at Carnegie Hall — https://www.udiscovermusic.com/news/nina-simone-mississippi-goddam-previews-newport-set/ (build store)

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Record CTL-E-6097 · Combined Graph record U-07318 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 3 sources · 1 mapped relationship.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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