"I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" is a list of wishes. The singer wants to break the chains that hold her. She wants to say what she should say, loud and clear, for the whole world to hear. She wants to share the love in her heart and take down the bars that keep people apart. She wishes you could know what it means to be her. Then you would agree that everyone should be free.
The wishes are large, but the first one is strange. Her wish is that she knew how it would feel. She is longing for something she has never seen. She cannot picture it well enough to describe it, so she asks for the feeling first.
In the last verse she reaches for a picture anyway. She would be a bird. She would soar toward the sun, look down at the sea, and sing because she knows. The song ends on that word. The knowing waits until the flight, and the flight is still spoken in the conditional. It is a dream of knowing, sung by someone who does not know yet.
Exodus tells of a whole people who stood there. They were born in bondage. Their parents were born in bondage. When freedom was announced, they could not hear it.
The Song and the Singer
The song began with a father and a child. The jazz pianist Billy Taylor wrote the tune for his daughter Kim. She had come home from school singing a spiritual. Taylor later recalled that she did not have the proper feel behind it, so he told her it was part of her heritage. Accounts differ on the year he wrote it. He recorded it on November 12, 1963, first as an instrumental.
The words came in stages. Kim has said her father wrote the first verse early, then got stuck and asked the lyricist Dick Dallas to help him finish. She hears her father's voice most clearly in that first verse. With lyrics, the song became an unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement.
Nina Simone recorded it in 1967 on her album Silk & Soul, and her version is the one most people know. By then she had already written "Mississippi Goddam" and "Four Women." Those songs accuse. This one wishes. One writer compared her version with Taylor's. Taylor's version brings the listener to church. Simone brings the church to the streets.
On stage she sometimes argued with it. At Montreux in 1976, near the end, she broke into the lyric and sang that she was free, and then that she was not. Both statements stood. The woman singing about freedom could feel it and lack it in the same breath.
Anguish of Spirit
Israel went down to Egypt as guests and stayed as slaves. Generations passed. A child born in the brick pits knew only the brick pits. So did that child's parents. Freedom was a story about Abraham, if it was told at all.
The first thing Scripture records them doing is wordless. "The children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage. And God heard their groaning" (Exodus 2:23–24). They did not pray for a plan. They had none. They groaned, and the groan was enough for God to hear.
Then God spoke freedom to them in plain words. "I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage, and I will redeem you with a stretched out arm" (Exodus 6:6). Jewish families still lift cups at the Passover table for the promises in these verses.
The people could not take them in. "They hearkened not unto Moses for anguish of spirit, and for cruel bondage" (6:9). The Hebrew for anguish is literally shortness of breath. They were too winded by the work to hear the promise. Freedom was being announced to people who had no way to imagine it.
That is the first verse of the song, the one Kim Taylor hears as her father's. It does not ask for a plan either. It asks to know the feeling, because the thing itself is out of sight.
Like Them That Dream
The song's last verse is a dream with wings. She would fly. She would soar to the sun. Only then would she sing that she knows.
Scripture uses the same image for the escape from Egypt, and it puts the wings on God. At Sinai He reminded them, "Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto myself" (Exodus 19:4). The slaves did not learn to fly. They were carried.
A later psalm sings the escape from the bird's point of view. "Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped" (Psalm 124:7). The bird does not break the snare. It finds the snare broken and goes.
David prayed for the same order of events from a cave. "Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name" (Psalm 142:7). The release comes first, and the praise follows. That is the song's order too. She will fly, and then she will sing.
When freedom finally comes, the psalmists admit it does not feel real at first. Psalm 126 remembers a return from captivity. "When the LORD turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing" (Psalm 126:1–2).
That is the song's ending, turned from wish to memory. Simone sings that she would sing once she knew. The psalm is sung by people who now know, and the first thing they say is that it felt like a dream. The singing came next. The feeling she wished to know turns out to be laughter, and it arrives before anyone can explain it.
No Fear
Simone was once asked directly what freedom meant to her. The filmed interview from the late 1960s later aired on public television. She began casually, then turned serious. "I'll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear." She said that if she could have it for half her life, that would be enough. She spoke of the freedom of being a child and the freedom she felt on stage.
It is a striking answer from a woman who sang about chains. She named a feeling, and the feeling was the absence of fear. That fits the song. She answered its question with the one feeling she most wanted gone.
Paul makes the same connection between bondage and fear. "For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father" (Romans 8:15). In Paul's mind slavery and fear are one condition. Its opposite is a child calling for a father.
Abba is the word a small child uses at home. Simone reached for childhood when she tried to describe freedom. Paul reaches for it too. Freedom, in his telling, is the fearlessness of a child who knows whose house this is.
Free Indeed
The song's first line joins two things. It wishes to know, and it wishes to be free. Yeshua joined the same two words when He spoke to people who had believed Him. "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32).
His hearers bristled. They said they were Abraham's seed and had never been in bondage to anyone. It was an odd claim from a people whose story began in Egypt and who were living under Rome. Yeshua answered that "whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin" (8:34). The bondage He meant runs deeper than the brick pits. Then He made a promise. "If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed" (8:36).
Free indeed answers Simone's ad lib at Montreux. She was free, and she was not. Most people who have been delivered from anything know that sentence. Pharaoh is behind them, but the fear has not left. Paul wrote to people in that place. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage" (Galatians 5:1). The freedom is given. Standing in it takes the rest of a life.
Billy Taylor wrote the first verse for a daughter who sang a spiritual before she could feel what it meant. Many of the spirituals were made by people who never saw freedom in this life and sang about it anyway. They knew the Exodus by heart. They knew the God who heard a groan. The song asks how freedom would feel. Scripture answers that it begins with being carried. It ends with a child at home, no longer afraid of the dark.