"Go Limp" | ||||
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Song by Nina Simone from the album Nina Simone in Concert | ||||
Released | 1964 | |||
Recorded | New York City, live at Carnegie Hall | |||
Label | Philips Records | |||
Writer(s) | Alex Comfort | |||
Composer(s) | Nina Simone | |||
Producer(s) | Hal Mooney | |||
Nina Simone in Concert track listing | ||||
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"Go Limp" is the penultimate track on Nina Simone's 1964 album Nina Simone in Concert, and is an adaptation of a protest song originally written by Alex Comfort during his involvement with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The melody and part of the chorus is from Sweet Betsy from Pike.
In adapting Comfort's lyrics for In Concert, Simone made only minor alterations of Comfort’s lyrics to re-situate “Go Limp” within the frame of the civil rights movement. Crucially, Simone replaces the acronym “CND” with “NAACP” in the second line of the first verse, in which the mother first appeals to her daughter. Thus, “Daughter, dear daughter take warning from me/Now don’t you go marching with the young CND” becomes “Daughter, dear daughter take warning from me/Now don’t you go marching with the NAACP.” In both versions, however, the concluding lines of the first verse remain the same: “For they’ll rock you and roll you and shove you into bed/and if they steal your nuclear secret, you’ll wish you were dead.”
Framed as a dialogue between a mother and daughter, “Go Limp” ostensibly warns against the sexual consequences of a young woman’s involvement in civil rights organizing. Initially assuring her mother that she will “go on that march and return a virgin maid,” the song’s protagonist nevertheless succumbs to the advances of “a young man… with a beard on his cheek and a gleam in his eye.” Forgetting the “brick in her handbag” that she carried with her to “shed off disgrace,” the young woman instead takes a cue from her nonviolence training when her suitor “[suggests] it was time she was kissed.” She chooses not to resist, and instead she allows herself to “go limp, and be carried away.” At the end of the song, the protagonist assures her mother that “though a baby there be” (and that the father “has left his name and address”), if the civil rights movement is ultimately successful, the child “won’t have to march like his da-da and me.”