though when she first introduced it into her act , apparently at Axelrod ’ s instigation , it was only as part of what she still regarded as a transition , out of this world of clubs and drinkers and into a more elevated world of concert music , attentive and knowledgeable music critics , and silent , rapt audiences . Not that she had any difficulty silencing Harry Steward ’ s sometimes rambunctious crowd .
Into her life at this point came Don Ross , who was to become her first husband . Analysing Simone ’ s experience with and attitude to men is even more complex than unpicking the roots of her stances on race . She told a Scottish interviewer that she had “ always made bad choices , but . . .”. She declined to elaborate on what lay behind the defiant / fatalistic shrug that came at the end of that trailed-off sentence . It was sometimes best not to press Nina for an answer , but her silence left some liberty for speculation . Perhaps those “ bad choices ” were part of her journey towards identity and towards the complex demographic that she eventually shaped for her work . Even as she later raged through “ Mississippi Goddam ”, her first explicitly engaged civil rights song , she must have been aware that her audience was as much white as black , her constituency young liberals and radicals who were trying to keep the disappointed embers of John F . Kennedy ’ s new-frontier ethics alive into Lyndon B . Johnson ’ s Great Society . “ Mississippi Goddam ” was written in the wake of the murder in 1963 of Medgar Evers , a 37 year old activist , shot by adherents of the Klan on June 12 1963 . His death , one compounded again by the refusal of a “ white ” hospital to treat a dying man of colour , came just hours after Kennedy had sat in front of cameras in the Oval Office and told the nation that it had been “ founded on the principle that all men are created equal and that the rights of every man are
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