Nina Simone: I Shall Be Released
(RCA Victor, 1969)
Marion Williams: I Shall Be Released
(Atlantic, 1969)
The Heptones: I Shall Be Released
(Studio One, 1969)
Keith Hudson: I Shall Be Released
(Mamba, 1974)
Rather than dig into the dark heart of the song, performers preferred to refashion it in their own image. Marion Williams and Nina Simone helped to reinvent “I Shall Be Released” as gospel, something that never sat right with me. In the declarative refrain black singers heard a sequel to “We Shall Overcome” and “People Get Ready,” but they too easily overlooked the spite and desolation of the verses, especially the first one:
They say everything can be replaced
Yet every distance is not near
So I remember every face
Of every man who put me here
Nina Simone and Marion Williams are powerful performers (how could they not be?), but they shouldn’t have mistaken “I Shall be Released” for a song of strength. Paired with the admissions of each verse, the refrain appears not as a determination to rise above, but as a cheerless mantra for a singer resigned to his lonely station. As with “Wild Horses,” this narrator seeks comfort from a promise in which he doesn’t believe. Often forgotten, the song ends with an image of madness:
Standing next to me in this lonely crowd
Is a man who swears he's not to blame
All day long I hear him shout so loud
Crying out that he was framed
“I Shall Be Released” makes more sense as a suicidal lament than a freedom singalong, but performers and audiences in the late Sixties were so hungry for the Dylan of “Blowing In the Wind” that no one noticed when a song about cold desperation was played as a campfire anthem.
The song took on a second life in Jamaica, where Jackie Mittoo and the Studio One house band applied a percolating rhythmic design to the old melody. For Jamaica singers “I Shall Be Released” could never be anything other than an emancipation song. With his tear-strewn tenor, Leroy Sibbles is perhaps the only performer who understood the song from Richard Manuel’s perspective, but in its new frisky arrangement “I Shall Be Released” sheds every trace of its shamble and gloom. Dozens of songs have been based off of The Heptones’ original, but the only Jamaican who came close to capturing the spirit of The Basement Tapes was Keith Hudson. He plays it like a leaky faucet, and when he sings the refrain in his cracked croon we finally understand the song as a hymn of ruination, not liberation.
