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Good morning,

‘It helps to change the world’, the words of Nina Simone about the effect of her music. Echoing from the archives, they featured in an item on this programme yesterday about ‘Mississippi Goddamn’: a celebration of the life and work of the singer and civil rights activist that took place at the Southbank Centre in London last night. I’d have loved to have been there.

Written in 1963, the song Mississippi Goddam marked a turning point in her music as – spurred on by the racial injustices she saw around her (in particular the murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the bombing of the 16th street Baptist Church in Alabama) – she wanted to use her music to make a difference in the world.

I’d like to think that being raised in the church – as many soul, jazz, and gospel musicians including Nina Simone were – inspired in them visions of how the world could and should be: what Christian theologians call the kingdom of God.

One may not be able to grasp it or touch it, but it shows up in a knowing sense that there is something better; some alternative way of being, some beautiful picture of human flourishing.

Art, music, poetry and literature have always played a unique role in providing hope and the possibility of change, despite the very present reality of dark times.

Art can speak to us in ways that other forms of expression can’t. I know I’ve often experienced the profound power of art installations and theatre and protest music and poetry.

Theologian Walter Brueggemann writes, in The Prophetic Imagination, ‘Every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.’

These hopeful visions conjured up by artists are why authoritarian leaders throughout history have attacked them.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis instigated strict censorship of art, in particular art created by Jews. Art under the Stalinist regime of the 1930s had to meet strict criteria so it didn’t undermine the government. In the 1970s, the Pinochet regime arrested and tortured Chilean muralists, driving many into exile.
And yet art has always broken out in prophetic ways.

Yes, Nina Simone may have been dubbed the high priestess of soul but she stands in a long line of women in history whose songs have challenged the status quo.

Perhaps the ultimate is Mary, Jesus’s mother, who in her Magnificat (which has also been banned in various places over the centuries), sings of a new world order in which the mighty are scattered and the rich are sent away empty.

A world turned upside down, or perhaps right way up.

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