Here’s to the State of Mississippi – Phil Ochs
If one wanted to develop a typology of states, there are plenty of features they could use to establish key lines of differentiation. Geography, climate, demographics, wealth, etc. But in many ways, it seems to me that you can define states quite well by identifying whether their quintessential songs are positive or negative about the state. For example, New Jersey certainly has its defenders, but it’s notable that the classic song of New Jersey is essentially a song about trying to get the hell out of New Jersey. Conversely, Colorado is by no means perfect but “Rocky Mountain High” comes pretty close to making it seem that way.
I say all this as way of introduction to my choice for my choice of the definitive song about Mississippi: a biting song from Phil Ochs, a man who wrote more than a few scorchers in his day.
There’s an argument to be made that, by treating Mississippi as some kind of extreme outlier, the song risks letting everyone else off the hook for systemic racism that is by no means confined to the Deep South. It also could be seen as writing off the righteous people who live in Mississippi (two-fifths of the inhabitants are African-American, after all). And there’s certainly some legitimacy to those criticisms.
Still, it remains important to mark the trauma, and this song is one of the finest examples of that process at work. Written in the aftermath of his own experiences in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer, it speaks to the regime of white terror that had been imposed, the casual destructiveness, the dehumanization, the impunity of its white citizens—who killed black men and women and suffered no consequence.
I think Ochs himself provided the best explanation of the song, and its proper place in our national imagination:
“I wrote that song the day 19 suspects were allowed to go free. It’s a song of passion, a song of raw emotional honesty, a song that records a sense of outrage. Even though reason later softens that rage, it is essential that rage is recorded, for how else can future generations understand the revulsion that swept the country? On another level, it is my act of murder against the good name of Mississippi, an act of vengeance that couldn’t begin to avenge the countless atrocities of that forsaken land. In other words, at the depth of its irresponsibility, Mississippi had become the symbol of evil in America, and the song is only exhorting that evil to leave.”