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Who Is Sister Sadie?

Referenced in many jazz songs even by the incomparable Nina Simone... who is Sister Sadie?

By SAYHERNAME Morgan SankofaPublished 5 years ago 3 min read
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Image Credit: Ruby Dee

So I know the reference "Sister Sadie" from the Nina Simone song "Mississippi Goddam." It has the line "Yes, you lied to me all these years you told me to wash and clean my ears, and talk real fine just like a lady and you’d stop calling me Sister Sadie."

This song directly speaks to the white moderate, who calls for patience in everyone's collective freedom versus radical rapid change for progress. I was told to look into Nina Simone's music by my dad during my Sophomore year of College and then I found my musical kin at last!

I found that Nina Simone was a woman that suffered. She suffered in the ways of racial injustice as a child. She also suffered from domestic abuse, mental illness, dissatisfaction, regret, and knew how it felt to have dirt kicked up on her when she was already down. She wrote of the seething anger from being overworked, and under-appreciated. She knew the burning pain of love lost, and the clenching fear of having that true love leave you. I related to Nina, who was a very accomplished person in piano or academic skills but she longed for her own dream. She was a natural crusader. And as I sang along to her Jazz album The Best of Nina Simone, songs like "Wild as the Wind," and "Pirate Jenny," I wanted to dig deeper into the roots of the music that supported her. Which genre would profit such a woman. Such lowness, such brilliance, and lyrics controversial, and witty. Her friends political leaders, and although she was from the South she had no hint of an accent, but something of a European draw.

It was Jazz. I was turned on to this genre, in late 2017 early 2018, and I was naturally affixed. Jazz takes your body and touches you into your lowest pleasant places. I would imagine it's notes so quick, so controlled, so abrupt, but then also able to be so gentle, so dreamy, and even mysterious. There are so many complexities in this seemingly "dated" genre of music, it is coded, it was scandalous and now I think it is underrated! But Sister Sadie fascinated me. To see a woman's name as a reference point in a song from when women did not have as many privileges as in 2019 in America peaked my curiosity. She sounds like a black woman to me, but someone used to mock other women. She sounds like a woman who is vastly misunderstood.

Here are the facts: "Sister Sadie" was a song by Horace Silver during his 1959 album Blowin' the Blues Away. The song got its lyrics by Eddie Jefferson in 1961 who invented Vocalese. This style of music improvised lyrics as the music played. Sister Sadie was invented in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where she was the wife of a runaway slave. She was a cook, and a healer for a widow. Imagine the strength that it takes to be the comforter of someone in such grief! This was a reference to black women being called Sister Sadie or having to be expected to act a certain way in order to gain rights as women. Black women are women. We are not simply "Sister Sadies" or characters. All women are not fictional monoliths. Women should not have their rights be optional just because one particular religion, or tradition, or society puts their own ideals on her. Every ideology is learned, it is not innate to make rights conditional.

So, yes Sister Sadie's are mislabeled. She is fictional, because real women do not have everlasting endurance. Real women get angry, frustrated, brave, but not in some unrealistic way. We are healers, and we can be cooks but real woman have conditions, and deep wounds. The Blues was sung by women, and "Sister Sadie" was a Jazz Standard!

pop culture
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About the Creator

SAYHERNAME Morgan Sankofa

Say Her Name

https://www.aapf.org/sayhername

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