Nina Simone wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in 1963, furious over the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and a Birmingham church bombing that killed four Black girls. More than sixty years later, Kaz Murphy draws inspiration from Simone’s furious answer to those killings.
That debt drives “Old Protest Records,” a folk song built almost entirely from other people’s titles. Murphy sets Simone beside Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” then works through Curtis Mayfield, Sam Cooke, Billie Holiday, Public Enemy, Woody Guthrie and plenty more, while Jacque Grad’s fiddle pulls the arrangement toward Appalachian bluegrass. Through all of it, the refrain claims each record “gives me some comfort in my mind.”
The titles carry the history. Murphy’s own contribution lives in the small words between them, and those small words make the argument. He links “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” Vicki Lawrence’s pop murder ballad about a man hanged for a killing his sister committed, to Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” with a single because, turning a Southern miscarriage of justice into the cause of a coming catastrophe. Guthrie’s “All You Fascists Bound to Lose” gets followed by a so, and the sentence resolves into Mayfield telling people to get ready. Murphy has said he chose every title deliberately to build a narrative, and the conjunctions are where you can watch him build it.
The final connection is the most personal. Murphy was a kid during the Vietnam War, when protest songs were everywhere, and he closes on Phil Ochs’s “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” a 1965 anti-war song sung by a soldier who has fought in every American war and refuses to fight another. Paired earlier with the spiritual “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” the title becomes the song’s thesis, and Murphy repeats it with extra denials stacked in front.
The comfort in those old records turns out to be a decision. Set to a fiddle this warm, laying down arms sounds like the easiest choice in the world.
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