Perhaps the greatest, most majestic song ever scribed and performed:
"To Be Young Gifted And Black" (And That's A Fact!)
Lyrics:
To be young, gifted and Black. Oh what a lovely precious dream.
To be young, gifted and Black. Open your heart to what I mean.
In the whole world you know. There's a billion boys and girls who are young, gifted and Black!
And thats a fact!
You are young, gifted and Black. We must begin to tell our young.
There's a world waiting for you. Yours is the quest that's just begun.
And, when you're feeling real low, there's a great truth that you should know. To be young gifted and Black, your souls intact!
(You here what I say!?!)
To be young, gifted and Black. Oh how I long to know the truth.
There are times when I look back, and I am haunted by my youth.
But, my joy of today, is that we can all be proud to say . . .
To be young, gifted and Black, is where it's at!! Is where it's at!! Is where it's at!!
Young, Gifted and Black was written and first performed by Nina Simone on the album Black Gold (1970). It was also the title cut of an Aretha Franklin album in 1972.
Nina Simone and The Gun
Also, Simone on Music as a Political Weapon:
"As a political weapon it has helped me for 30 years defend the rights of American blacks and third world people all over the world, to defend them with protest songs."
Nina Simone The Emotional Depths of the Spirit World
"Although this style of singing has sometimes been described as letting it all hang out or letting one’s self go, there is a huge amount of discipline and artistry required to successfully execute these kinds of performances where the artist clearly becomes a vessel ridden by some invisible force."
"With a voice that embodied the pain and power of the scattered African diaspora and classic West African facial features that suggested a short distance between the Tyron, North Carolina of her birth and Kwame Nkrumuh's Ghana, Nina Simone couldn't help being political."
"Simone credits the great black playwright Lorraine Hansberry as the person who “allowed me to see the bigger picture”. Hansberry, she said, “saw civil rights as only one part of the wider racial and class struggle”.
"When the Hansberry died of cancer at the age of 34, Simone wrote and recorded a song in her honour. Its title, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”, was the name of the play Hansberry was writing at the time of her death. The song went on to become an anthem of the civil rights movement."
"When I listen to Nina Simone, I feel as if I am living inside the song with her.
Her voice pulls you into her world, a world of poverty, racism, a world that kills schoolchildren in Alabama, a world that makes your heart heavy, your heart soar.
She had a way of making me join her as I listen, as if I were marching with her. Angry at her angers; sad with her sadness."
This tune "Mississippi Goddamn" was written after the church bombing of at unresolved case of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four little Black girls, Adie Mae Collins, 14, Carol Denise McNair, 11, Carole Rosamond Robertson, 14, and Cynthia Wesley, 14.
"There was something about the heaviness in the timbre of Simone's voice and the lightness of her fingers on the piano keys that produced a sound of tremendous joy and tremendous sorrow -- simultaneously."
"At the height of her fame she was closely associated with the black civil rights movement, connected with both the radical black playwright Lorraine Hansberry and the controversial Malcolm X."
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