1950s-60s: Civil Rights Era and a New Type of Protest Song

The second song in my chronology is Nina Simone's 1965 song "Marriage is For Old Folks." Because there are no video performances of Simone singing this song, I layered the audio over a video of Simone performing "Ain't Go No, I Got Life." I didn't choose this video for any particular reason other than it was around the same length as the audio. Enjoy!

Transcript:

From her 1965 album “I Put a Spell On You,” Nina Simone’s “Marriage is For Old Folks” truly is a notable song in this prolific artist’s discography. A song that I was unfamiliar with until this project.

If it wasn’t obvious from the title, “Marriage is for old folks” is about Simone’s disdain towards marriage.

The song is pretty simple lyrically. Let’s listen to the chorus:

Marriage is for old folks

Old folks, not for me!

One husband

One wife

Whaddya got?

Two people sentenced for life!

As I said before, pretty simple lyrics. But what Nina Simone is doing with this song is actually part of a larger tradition of Black woman musical resistance. This song is both anti respectability politics and anti-assimilationist. Simone refuses to conform to the societal expectations for young women to rush to marry a man, and be, as Simone says “sentenced for life.”

In “Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone’s Africana Womanism,” Jasmine A. Mena and P. Khalil Saucier analyze “Marriage is for Old Folks” saying:

“In "Marriage Is for Old Folks," Simone expresses her desire to be free from marriage, which for her, equals constraint and boredom. She boldly offers that women can also play with casual relationships, does not want to conform to societal expectations and refuses to engage in traditionally female tasks. She clearly states that she does not want to belong nor be controlled by a man, rather by herself.”

Simone’s refusal to be tied down by a man, today, may not seem revolutionary as we are used to hearing songs about sexual liberation by Black women popular music artists such as Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé, and Cardi B. But, what Simone does with this song is open the doors for contemporary Black women musicians to be able to make the songs that they make now.

Further, on “Marriage is for Old Folks,” Simone follows in the traditions of the blues women who came before her who rejected tradition and marriage, such as Ma Rainey. As Angela Davis explains in “I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama,” the blues women of 1920s-30s rejected the expectations for women, particularly newly emancipated Black women, to get married. Davis says:

“The representations of love and sexuality in women’s blues often blatantly contradicted mainstream ideological assumptions regarding women and being in love. They also challenged the notion that women’s “place” was in the domestic sphere. Such notions were based on the social realities of middle-class white women’s lives, but were incongruously applied to all women, regardless of race or class.”

In “Marriage is for Old Folks,” Simone directly speaks to the notions of the women’s place being in the domestic sphere and how those notions do not reflect her reality or desires, much like the blues women that came before her. Lyrics such as

Cookin' dinner

Lookin' no thinner

Gray elbows and

A sudsy sea

Are a direct response to the expected behaviors of a wife: cooking dinner for and cleaning up after her husband. Simone refuses to engage with these expectations as she says in the song that she is “exploding with youth and zest” and that she needs to “fly her wings, go places, do things” all things that are in opposition to being sentenced to a life of marriage, cleaning, and cooking

The song ends with Simone singing a slightly modified chorus where she says “Can’t you see / Marriage ain't for me” driving in her message and reminding listeners that she is her own free woman.

Works Cited:

Davis, Angela Y. “I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama,” Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.

Mena, Jasmine A., and P. Khalil Saucier. “‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’: Nina Simone’s Africana Womanism.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, Sage Publications, Inc., 2014, pp. 247–65. JSTOR.

Nina Simone – Marriage Is for Old Folks Lyrics | Genius Lyrics. https://genius.com/Nina-simone-marriage-is-for-old-folks-lyrics. Accessed 9 Dec. 2020.