![]() Folks, you’d better stop and think, she crooned, Everybody knows we’re on the brink / What will happen / Now that the King is dead. Simone posed an open-ended question to a country eviscerated over civil and human rights and one barreling toward an election that would alter the course of America. ![]() ![]() Composed by bassist Gene Taylor 24 hours after the murder of King in Memphis, Tennessee, the ode became a haunting soundtrack as uprisings ignited across the country. Simone revealed the inspiration for her Ain’t Got No, I Got Life from 1968’s ‘ Nuff Said! (RCA/Victor) and gracefully transitioned into talking about another song from the same project, Why? (The King of Love Is Dead). And black America - really, America as a whole - was still reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. Tommie Smith and John Carlos were weeks away from raising their fists on the Olympic medal stage in Mexico City. He was in the second year of his boxing exile after refusing military induction during the Vietnam War and awaited word from the government if prison time would effectively do what no man had been able to do: knock him out and essentially end his career. ![]() That you have your health.” Simone was speaking with an Italian radio station.Īround this same time: Muhammad Ali resided in Chicago, further immersing himself in Islam. “In these days,” said Nina Simone in 1968, “in these hard times, you must be grateful that you are surviving.
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