Oh, hello! That last track (Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,”) was a gloomy, black-as-night dirge about the inconceivable imagery of people (people!) being handled as so much dead flesh – dripping from the trees from which they were hanged, to be perfectly blunt about it. This time it’s the most badass Rodgers & Hammerstein you’ll ever hear (because it is in no way a Rodgers & Hammerstein song). It’s a very Nina Simone song, in fact - you can almost tell she wrote it so that she could perform it and so that the whiteys in the audience would be all “Ooh, honey [nudging], this is going to be fu – oh.”

Anyway, part of its inspiration comes from the murder of Medgar Evers, who was shot down in his own yard in Jackson, MS. The song is full of hot, sweaty, Mississippi anger, and by the end of its 5 minutes there’s no mistaking it for some moon-eyed dose of garbage from those two Oklahoma jokers.

MAPPING IT

It’s in Mississippi. The South.

HEARING IT