When armored troops and tanks arrived in the St. Louis sub­urb of Fer­gu­son, advanc­ing on civil­ians with guns drawn and launch­ing tear gas can­is­ters into the crowd, more than a few peo­ple watch­ing it hap­pen exclaimed, “Mis­souri God­dam!” After the Charleston, SC mas­sacre last sum­mer, many exclaimed, “South Car­oli­na God­dam!” The phras­es direct­ly ref­er­ence an ear­li­er, all too sim­i­lar, time in the vio­lent his­to­ry of civ­il rights strug­gles, 1964, when Nina Simone wrote and per­formed “Mis­sis­sip­pi God­dam” (above in Hol­land). It was “a song that would change her career,” writes Matt Stag­gs at Sig­na­ture, “com­pli­cat­ing her rela­tion­ship with the white estab­lish­ment while cement­ing her alle­giance with the civ­il rights move­ment.”

After her ambi­tions as a con­cert pianist were frus­trat­ed, Simone rose to fame as a bril­liant­ly tal­ent­ed per­former of clas­si­cal, jazz, folk, blues, and cabaret music. She “did not so much inter­pret songs,” writes Adam Shatz in the New York Review of Books, “as take pos­ses­sion of them.” But her most famous remains her own com­po­si­tion, “Mis­sis­sip­pi God­dam,” a pas­sion­ate response to the mur­der of Medgar Evers, the Six­teenth Street Church bomb­ing in Birm­ing­ham, and oth­er shock­ing acts of bru­tal­i­ty by mem­bers of the White Cit­i­zens Coun­cil and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as the retal­ia­to­ry police vio­lence and mass arrests at Ten­nessee sit-ins.

After her first per­for­mance of the song at a 1964 Carnegie Hall con­cert (dur­ing which she shout­ed at the shocked audi­ence, “You’re all gonna die!”), it would become “a civ­il rights anthem.” The per­for­mance itself was a sly bait-and-switch; “deter­mined to bring a taste of the era’s injus­tice to her most­ly white audi­ence,” Simone intro­duced the song as a “show tune, but the show has­n’t been writ­ten for it yet.” And indeed it sounds like one, “at least for a few moments.” The song, writes Shatz, “rep­re­sent­ed a rev­o­lu­tion in black polit­i­cal ora­to­ry.”

Now, many peo­ple born long after Simone’s that first bomb­shell per­for­mance of “Mis­sis­sip­pi God­dam” are dis­cov­er­ing her life and work through the Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed Net­flix doc­u­men­tary What Hap­pened, Miss Simone!, as well as the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing a two-year-old unre­leased biopic (so heat­ed even its star dis­avowed the film). Released on the day of mur­dered pas­tor and State Sen­a­tor Clemen­ta Pinck­ney’s funer­al, the doc­u­men­tary renews the focus on Simone’s role as a fierce activist on and off the stage. In songs like “Back­lash Blues,” writ­ten by Langston Hugh­es (above, in a live 1968 Paris record­ing ses­sion), Simone protest­ed “sec­ond class hous­es / and sec­ond class schools” as well as the Viet­nam War draft and frozen wages.

In “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” above in a 1976 per­for­mance, she express­es pro­found long­ing to “share / All the love that’s in my heart” and “Remove all the bars / That keep us apart.” As Shatz tells us, Simone once defined what free­dom meant to her when an inter­view­er asked in 1968: “I’ll tell you what free­dom is to me: no fear. I mean real­ly, no fear!” She seemed to embody fear­less­ness onstage as she devot­ed her career to activism.

And yet, writes Clau­dia Roth Pier­pont in The New York­er, she “had been hes­i­tant at first.” It was play­wright Lor­raine Hans­ber­ry who pushed her into speak­ing, though she “only start­ed a process that events in Amer­i­can quick­ly accel­er­at­ed.” After the Birm­ing­ham bomb­ing, Simone recalled want­i­ng to “go out and kill some­one… I could iden­ti­fy as being in the way of my peo­ple.” Instead she took her out­rage to the stage, and she memo­ri­al­ized Hans­ber­ry after her friend’s death at age 34 with a song she called “the Black nation­al anthem,” also the title of Hans­ber­ry’s posthu­mous auto­bi­og­ra­phy, “To Be Young, Gift­ed and Black.” Before the per­for­mance above, at a More­house Col­lege record­ing ses­sion in 1969, Simone emo­tion­al­ly describes the gen­e­sis of the song in an inter­view. The song itself hints broad­ly at the pain of her own child­hood, and that of so many oth­ers, then con­cludes with pride, hope, and affir­ma­tion.

Young, gift­ed and black
How I long to know the truth
There are times when I look back
And I am haunt­ed by my youth

Oh 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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nina Simone Sings Her Break­through Song, ‘I Loves You Por­gy,’ in 1962

Watch a New Nina Simone Ani­ma­tion Based on an Inter­view Nev­er Aired in the U.S. Before

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

There are a great many com­po­si­tions I can nev­er hear again the way I did the first time around. Aaron Copland’s Amer­i­can sym­phonies, for example—sentimental child­hood favorites that once evoked mem­o­ries of land­scapes I knew well—have since become insep­a­ra­ble from adver­tise­ments for the meat indus­try and oth­er dis­agree­able things. Many oth­er icon­ic pieces of music from major com­posers have become woven into the fab­ric of mar­ket­ing that blan­kets our lives, in part because many of those pieces don’t require expen­sive per­mis­sions for their use. Anoth­er unfor­get­table exam­ple: George Gershwin’s Rhap­sody in Blue, the jazz con­cer­to from 1924 that I can­not hear with­out think­ing of “spa­cious seat­ing options and thought­ful inflight ameni­ties,” care­ful­ly orches­trat­ed for my com­fort and con­ve­nience.

But if there is some way to recov­er the puri­ty of hear­ing Gershwin’s piece for the first time, no bet­ter one exists than the abridged record­ings we have here, which rep­re­sent some of what the very first audi­ences of Rhap­sody in Blue heard in 1924, includ­ing Gersh­win him­self play­ing the piano.

They also rep­re­sent exact­ly what the first lis­ten­ers of Gershwin’s piece on record heard—the rather thin sound we’ve come to asso­ciate with ear­ly audio tech­nol­o­gy, which did not fea­ture any elec­tron­ics until 1925. Up until then, small clas­si­cal ensem­bles, opera singers, and jazz and rag­time bands would stand around a horn, with engi­neers plac­ing them for­ward or back depend­ing on their empha­sis. (Some jazz record­ings with mul­ti­ple soloists were made on rotat­ing plat­forms for this pur­pose). As the musi­cians played, a vibrat­ing diaphragm moved the sty­lus, mechan­i­cal­ly etch­ing the per­for­mance onto the record. At the top of the post, you can hear a mod­ern remas­ter that removes most of the noise of the orig­i­nal, which is in two parts above and below.

In addi­tion to Gersh­win, the record­ing also fea­tures the orig­i­nal clar­inetist, Ross Gor­man, who played that famous open­ing glis­san­do at the debut of Rhap­sody in Blue on Feb­ru­ary 12, 1924, at New York’s Aeo­lian Hall. Gersh­win’s piece was the cap­stone of an event billed as an “Exper­i­ment in Mod­ern Music,” orga­nized by Paul White­man, who con­duct­ed the orches­tra onstage and record. The pur­pose of the event, writes History.com, was to “demon­strate that the rel­a­tive­ly new form of music called jazz deserved to be regard­ed as a seri­ous and sophis­ti­cat­ed art form.” It sounds con­de­scend­ing, to say the least, but it brought us Gershwin’s won­der­ful com­po­si­tion and helped him “tran­scend the cat­e­go­ry of pop­u­lar music” and become a well-regard­ed com­pos­er. New York Times crit­ic Olin Downes wrote of Rhap­sody in Blue, with its “out­ra­geous caden­za of the clar­inet,” that the “com­po­si­tion shows extra­or­di­nary tal­ent, just as it also shows a young com­pos­er with aims that go far beyond those of his ilk.”

Cer­tain­ly those of Gershwin’s “ilk” made their own extra­or­di­nary con­tri­bu­tions to mod­ern Amer­i­can music, as did Gersh­win him­self in Broad­way show after show. But Gershwin’s inter­est in bring­ing jazz to the clas­si­cal world has been shared by oth­er famous jazz com­posers, from Duke Elling­ton to Charles Min­gus. The results may not “tran­scend” more straight-ahead jazz in some hier­ar­chi­cal sense, but they inno­vate in the way that the very best “exper­i­ments in mod­ern music” do, by bold­ly putting two or more forms in con­ver­sa­tion with each oth­er. In Gershwin’s piece, we hear jazz and clas­si­cal fig­ures argue and come to terms, jostling against each oth­er as they come together—the laugh­ing clar­inet, pompous brass, roman­tic piano—producing the kind of gen­teel ten­sion that… dammit, I guess is pret­ty well rep­re­sent­ed by reclin­ing in an air­plane seat, 30,000 feet above the ground.…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ella Fitzger­ald Sings ‘Sum­mer­time’ by George Gersh­win, Berlin 1968

Such Sweet Thun­der: Duke Elling­ton & Bil­ly Strayhorn’s Musi­cal Trib­ute to Shake­speare (1957)

Charles Min­gus Explains in His Gram­my-Win­ning Essay “What is a Jazz Com­pos­er?”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

You may have heard the recent hub­bub over an antique Mar­tin gui­tar from the 1870s that end­ed up smashed to bits on the set of Quentin Taran­ti­no’s ultra­vi­o­lent West­ern The Hate­ful Eight. Maybe you saw peo­ple gnash their teeth online and said, “so what? It’s just a gui­tar!” Fair enough, and a Stradi­var­ius is just a vio­lin. I exag­ger­ate a lit­tle, but many gui­tar lovers who watched the clip of Kurt Rus­sell destroy­ing the price­less arti­fact (unwit­ting­ly, it seems) felt the impact for days after­ward. As Col­in Mar­shall wrote in a post fea­tur­ing that footage, “You can still go out and buy a ser­vice­able gui­tar from the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry with­out com­plete­ly wip­ing out your sav­ings, but you’d be hard pressed to find a Mar­tin made a few decades earlier—such as the one smashed in The Hate­ful Eight—at any price at all; less than ten may exist any­where.”

You can see one of those relics above; the old­est known Mar­tin in exis­tence, in fact, made decades ear­li­er than the wrecked gui­tar from Taran­ti­no’s set—made, in fact, in 1834, just one year after cab­i­net mak­er C.F. Mar­tin moved to New York City from his native Ger­many, where he had run into trou­ble with the Vio­lin Mak­er’s Guild who claimed exclu­sive rights over instru­ment man­u­fac­tur­ing. Mar­tin imme­di­ate­ly began pro­duc­ing gui­tars, like the small-bod­ied Stauf­fer-style instru­ment above, before mov­ing his fac­to­ry to its cur­rent loca­tion of Nazareth, Penn­syl­va­nia, where the Mar­tin Muse­um is locat­ed. In the video, folk gui­tarist Ste­vie Coyle has the plea­sure of pick­ing out The Bea­t­les’ “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” and an orig­i­nal tune called “Salt­flat Rhap­sody” on the aged instru­ment, which sounds just a lit­tle bit like a Medieval lute.

Just above, see Chris Mar­tin IV, great-great-great-grand­son of the famed gui­tar mak­er and cur­rent CEO of the com­pa­ny give a tour of the muse­um, point­ing out what gui­tar his­to­ri­ans believe is the ear­li­est gui­tar with X‑bracing, the inno­v­a­tive inner archi­tec­ture C.F. Mar­tin sup­pos­ed­ly invent­ed when com­ing up with his own designs and mov­ing away from those of his men­tor, Johann Stauf­fer. After the pain of watch­ing a beau­ti­ful vin­tage Mar­tin smashed to bits in Taran­ti­no’s film, it’s a great consolation—for gui­tar nerds at least—to see how well the Mar­tin Muse­um has pre­served so much of the com­pa­ny’s his­to­ry and kept such ear­ly mod­els in playable con­di­tion.

Relat­ed Con­di­tion:

Price­less 145-Year-Old Mar­tin Gui­tar Acci­den­tal­ly Gets Smashed to Smithereens in Tarantino’s The Hate­ful Eight

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

How Fend­er Gui­tars Are Made, Then (1959) and Nowa­days (2012)

The Sto­ry of the Gui­tar: The Com­plete Three-Part Doc­u­men­tary

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

There are a num­ber of well known perks to being a rock star. One of the more obscure ones is sus­tained access to zero grav­i­ty, the con­di­tion of rel­a­tive near weight­less­ness achiev­able in a state of free fall.

The band OK Go put their priv­i­lege to good use in the new video for their song “Upside Down & Inside Out.”

Access should not be equat­ed with ease, how­ev­er, as singer Damien Kulash and his sis­ter, direc­tor and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Trish Sie, explain above. The band’s web­site goes into fur­ther detail about the sci­ence of the shoot inside an indus­tri­al Russ­ian mil­i­tary air­craft fly­ing par­a­bol­ic maneu­vers:

The longest peri­od of weight­less­ness that it is pos­si­ble to achieve in these cir­cum­stances is about 27 sec­onds, and after each peri­od of weight­less­ness, it takes about five min­utes for the plane to recov­er and pre­pare for the next round. Because we want­ed the video to be a sin­gle, unin­ter­rupt­ed rou­tine, we shot con­tin­u­ous­ly over the course of 8 con­sec­u­tive weight­less peri­ods, which took about 45 min­utes, total. We paused our actions, and the music, dur­ing the non-weight­less peri­ods, and then cut out these sec­tions and smoothed over each tran­si­tion with a morph.

The Russ­ian flight crew col­lab­o­rat­ed with the non-Russ­ian-speak­ing film crew and band on a mutu­al­ly com­pre­hen­si­ble count­down sys­tem that ensured every­one was ready to rum­ble each time the plane hit zero grav­i­ty.

Sim­u­lat­ed over­head bins, bus seats, and dum­my win­dows lit from with LEDs pro­vid­ed the illu­sion of a com­mer­cial flight.

The copi­ous off­screen air sick­ness was not faked (58 regur­gi­ta­tions by Tim Nord­wind’s reck­on­ing.)

The fin­ished prod­uct, right above, is the crown­ing achieve­ment for a band long cel­e­brat­ed for task­ing itself with one-take video chal­lenges involv­ing tread­mills, Ikea fur­ni­ture, and trained ani­mals. (That’s direc­tor Sie in front of the cam­era with tan­go part­ner Moti Buch­boot for “Sky­scrap­ers.”)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Notre Dame March­ing Band Per­forms “This Too Shall Pass”

Michel Gondry’s Finest Music Videos for Björk, Radio­head & More: The Last of the Music Video Gods

David Fincher’s Five Finest Music Videos: From Madon­na to Aero­smith

Derek Jar­man Cre­ates Pio­neer­ing Music Videos for The Smiths, Mar­i­anne Faith­full & the Pet Shop Boys

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

In my lit­tle cor­ner of the world, we’re eager­ly antic­i­pat­ing the arrival of Moogfest this May, just moved down the moun­tains from Asheville—where it has con­vened since 2004—to the scrap­py town of Durham, NC. Like SXSW for elec­tron­ic music, the four-day event fea­tures dozens of per­for­mances, work­shops, talks, films, and art instal­la­tions. Why North Car­oli­na? Because that’s where New York City-born engi­neer Robert Moog (rhymes with “vogue”)—inventor of one of the first, and cer­tain­ly the most famous, ana­log synthesizer—moved in 1978 and set up shop for his hand­made line of mod­u­lar synths, “Minimoog”s, and oth­er unique cre­ations. “One doesn’t hear much talk of syn­the­siz­ers here in west­ern North Car­oli­na,” Moog said at the time, “From this van­tage point, it’s easy to get a good per­spec­tive on the elec­tron­ic musi­cal instru­ment scene.”

The per­spec­tive char­ac­ter­izes Moog’s influ­ence on mod­ern music since the late-sixties—as a non-musi­cian out­sider whose musi­cal tech­nol­o­gy stands miles above the com­pe­ti­tion, its unmis­tak­able sound sought after by near­ly every­one in pop­u­lar music since it debuted on a num­ber of com­mer­cial record­ings in 1967. A curi­ous devel­op­ment indeed, since Moog nev­er intend­ed the syn­the­siz­er to be used as a stand­alone instru­ment but as a spe­cial­ized piece of stu­dio equip­ment. How­ev­er, in the mid-six­ties, a for­ward-look­ing jazz musi­cian named Paul Beaver hap­pened to get his hands on a mod­u­lar Moog syn­the­siz­er, and began to use it on odd, psy­che­del­ic albums like Mort Garson’s The Zodi­ac Cos­mic Sounds and famed Wreck­ing Crew drum­mer Hal Blaine’s Psy­che­del­ic Per­cus­sion (hear “Love-In (Decem­ber)” above).

Short­ly after these releas­es, Mike Bloomfield’s psych-rock out­fit The Elec­tric Flag made heavy use of the Moog in their sound­track for Roger Corman’s six­ties­ploita­tion film The Trip (hear “Fine Jung Thing” above), and the ana­log syn­the­siz­er was on its way to becom­ing a sta­ple of pop­u­lar music. In late ’67, The Doors called Beaver into the stu­dio dur­ing the record­ing of Strange Days, and he used the Moog through­out the album to alter Jim Morrison’s voice and pro­vide oth­er effects (hear “Strange Days” at the top). Con­trary to pop­u­lar mis­con­cep­tions, Bri­an Wil­son did not use a Moog syn­the­siz­er for the record­ing of “Good Vibra­tions” the year pri­or, but an “elec­tro-theremin” built and played by Paul Tan­ner. He did, how­ev­er, have Bob Moog build a repli­ca of that instru­ment to play the song live. (The Moog theremin is still in pro­duc­tion today.)

Then, in 1968 Wendy Car­los used a Moog Syn­the­siz­er to rein­ter­pret sev­er­al Bach com­po­si­tions, and Switched-On Bach became a nov­el­ty hit that led to many more clas­si­cal Moog record­ings from Car­los, as well as to her orig­i­nal con­tri­bu­tions to Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing. (Unfor­tu­nate­ly, few of Car­los’ record­ings are avail­able online, but you can hear The Shin­ing’s main theme above.) Switched-On Bach took the Moog syn­the­siz­er mainstream—it was the first clas­si­cal album to go plat­inum. (Glenn Gould called it “one of the most star­tling achieve­ments of the record­ing indus­try in this gen­er­a­tion and cer­tain­ly one of the great feats in the his­to­ry of key­board per­for­mance.”) And after the release of Car­los’ futur­is­tic clas­si­cal albums, and an evo­lu­tion of Moog’s instru­ments into more musi­cian-friend­ly forms, ana­log synths began to appear every­where.

Artists like Car­los explored the syn­the­siz­er’s use as not only a gen­er­a­tor of weird, spaced-out sounds and effects, but as an instru­ment in its own right, capa­ble of all of the nuance required to play the finest clas­si­cal music. The mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­er, how­ev­er, was still an awk­ward­ly bulky instru­ment, suit­ed for the stu­dio, not the road. That changed in 1971 when the “Min­i­moog Mod­el D” was born. You can see a short his­to­ry of that rev­o­lu­tion­ary instru­ment above. The Min­i­moog and its sib­lings drove prog rock, dis­co, jazz fusion, the ambi­ent work of Bri­an Eno, Teu­ton­ic elec­tro-pop of Kraftwerk, and sooth­ing Gal­lic new age sound­scapes of Jean-Michel Jarre. Bob Mar­ley incor­po­rat­ed the Min­i­moog into his roots reg­gae, and Gary Numan chart­ed the path of the New Wave future with the portable syn­the­siz­er.

And as any­one who’s heard Daft Punk’s now-ubiq­ui­tous Ran­dom Access Mem­o­ries knows, the fore­fa­ther of their sound was Ital­ian super­pro­duc­er Gior­gio Moroder, who brought us near­ly all of Don­na Sum­mer’s dis­co hits, includ­ing the futur­is­tic “I Feel Love,” above, in 1977. Although noth­ing real­ly sound­ed like this at the time—nor for many years afterward—we can hear in this pio­neer­ing track that it’s only a short hop from Moroder’s puls­ing, flang­ing, synth arpeg­gios to most of the mod­ern dance music we hear today.

Though we cer­tain­ly cred­it all of the com­posers, pro­duc­ers, and musi­cians who embraced ana­log syn­the­siz­ers and pushed their devel­op­ment for­ward, all of their musi­cal inno­va­tion would have meant lit­tle with­out the inven­tive­ness of the man who, from his moun­tain­top retreat in Asheville, North Car­oli­na, per­son­al­ly over­saw the tech­nol­o­gy of a musi­cal rev­o­lu­tion. For more on the genius of Bob Moog, watch Hans Fjellestad’s doc­u­men­tary Moog, or lis­ten to the Sound Opin­ions pod­cast above, fea­tur­ing one­time offi­cial Moog Foun­da­tion his­to­ri­an Bri­an Kehew.

A quick fyi: You now stream for a lim­it­ed time Sum­mer­time: Willie Nel­son Sings Gersh­win. The new album fea­tures Nel­son cov­er­ing 11 clas­sic songs writ­ten by George and Ira Gersh­win. And it includes duets with Cyn­di Lau­per and Sheryl Crow. You can stream the album (due to be offi­cial­ly released on Feb­ru­ary 26th) right below, or hear it over on NPR’s First Lis­ten site. Enjoy.

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Willie Nel­son Shows You a Delight­ful Card Trick

Ella Fitzger­ald Sings ‘Sum­mer­time’ by George Gersh­win, Berlin 1968

Bob Dylan & The Grate­ful Dead Rehearse Togeth­er in Sum­mer 1987: Hear 74 Tracks