Making the Music for Mississippi Goddam 

To create the original score for podcast serial Mississippi Goddam, our sound designers Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda knew one thing they wanted to steer clear of: a “true crime” soundtrack. Our reporting team had a goal from the beginning: The seven-episode series, which investigates the death of teenage football star Billey Joe Johnson Jr. in Mississippi, should not be the salacious or exploitative kind of storytelling that can happen with true crime stories. The team wanted the music to reflect the depth and historical connections to this story, not just its dramatic arc. “When we're walking people through this whole story, we wanted nothing that felt heavy handed,” Briggs says. 

The team began the music design process squarely with the project's title, taking inspiration from where else but Nina Simone’s searing 1964 song “Mississippi Goddam.” Briggs and Arruda wrote and recorded over a dozen versions of the song in different styles, including blues, hip-hop and electronic dance music. The variations gave the team a sense of range and possibilities, but it took more time to locate the right tone for the series. So instead of making the song more complicated, Briggs and Arruda tried the opposite: stripping everything out except for vocals, bass and layers of percussive hand claps. Host Al Letson brought in singer Mama Blue for a searing rendition from a Black Southern voice. “That was what rang true,” Arruda says. (To hear that stripped-down version, skip to 12:25 of episode 1.)

The composers also needed to write a theme for the series that they could weave through each episode. “It's got to kick ass at some points, but it’s also got to speak to this quiet rage and the power of the different moments in the story,” Briggs says. “I want it to be memorable and pull you into the show.” Letson begins the series by explaining how he promised Johnson’s family that he would investigate his suspicious death. For the sound design team, this was a way into the story, one that the audience is reminded of throughout the series. On the piano, Briggs composed a haunting theme called “The Promise.” The duo expanded on that piano theme throughout each episode, Briggs explains, creating different “Promise” versions and “kind of grafting new branches onto a tree.” 

Listen to the original music from Mississippi Goddam on Reveal’s Bandcamp. 

Behind the Scenes: Performing History on Mississippi Goddam

Alexis Hightower works behind the scenes at Reveal on a wide range of projects. Outside of Reveal, she works professionally as a musician, vocal artist and music educator. So when the team needed a powerful voice to tell an important story in Chapter 7 of the series, Letson knew who to ask. The episode begins with Hightower and Letson’s voices telling the intertwining history of Nina Simone becoming an acclaimed performer while Medgar Evers became a civil rights activist. After a White supremacist assassinated Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, Simone composed the song “Mississippi Goddam” to express her response to the racist violence. As Hightower says in the episode, Simone’s first protest song “flows out of her like the mighty Mississippi River. Its righteous anger demands to be heard.” The story felt deeply relevant for Hightower, who lives close to a school named in honor of Evers. “The episode itself is really moving; it’s heartbreaking,” she says. “There were a lot of emotional notes that were very resonant.” 

Listen to the story of Nina Simone and Medgar Evers in episode 7 of Mississippi Goddam: Reasonable Doubt. 

Follow Hightower’s musical work on Instagram via @mzhightower.

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