Ain’t Got No, I Got Life — Nina Simone’s stroke of genius was to synthesise two different songs

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When the actors James Rado and Gerome Ragni wrote the lyrics to the songs “I’m Black/Ain’t Got No” and “I Got Life” for their rock musical Hair, they could surely never have anticipated hearing the two tracks yoked together by one of the biggest stars of the 1960s. Appearing at different points in the show, and expressing contrasting themes and emotions, the songs were unlikely partners, but, in a stroke of genius, Nina Simone synthesised them into something new and powerful.

Hair, “the American tribal love-rock musical”, premiered off-Broadway in 1967 at New York’s Public Theater during a period of escalating American involvement in Vietnam. The show was a daring, if patchouli-scented, jab at mainstream society, harnessing the period’s rising anti-war sentiment and the feelings of anger and uncertainty consuming America’s youth, while embracing the counterculture and sexual revolution. Rado and Ragni, who met while acting in the 1964 off-Broadway play Hang Down Your Head and Die, which was apparently so dire it closed after one performance, wrote the story and lyrics, Galt MacDermot the music. 

“I got life, mother,” he begins, ushered by the strum of an electric guitar. “I got freedom, brother/I got good times, good times man,” each line stretched and savoured, giving a sense of privileged lassitude, of basking in freedom, culminating in the invigorating repetition of “I got life! Life! Life! Life!” 

Let us know your memories of ‘Ain’t Got No, I Got Life’ in the comments section below

The paperback edition of ‘The Life of a Song: The stories behind 100 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Chambers

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