{"id":5136,"date":"2024-03-30T08:50:04","date_gmt":"2024-03-30T12:50:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=5136"},"modified":"2024-03-30T11:34:26","modified_gmt":"2024-03-30T15:34:26","slug":"alabama-bound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/alabama-bound\/","title":{"rendered":"Alabama Bound (Jelly Roll Morton, and many others)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Alabama Bound\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/yNWAYOifW_M?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve known &#8220;Alabama Bound&#8221; forever, but never worked it up as a performance piece, and am posting it now because I used it as the theme of chapter one of my new book, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/jellyrollbook.html\"><em>Jelly Roll Blues<\/em><\/a>, an exploration of <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-5067\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Jellycover-e1710359243890.jpg?resize=193%2C291&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"193\" height=\"291\" \/>Jelly Roll Morton&#8217;s Library of Congress recordings, the world that nurtured early blues, and the ways that world was censored, reimagined, and shaped for general consumption by early folklorists and music marketers.<\/p>\n<p>This song was an obvious place to begin, for a couple of reasons. First, it was how Morton began the LOC recordings, which I use as a through-thread for the book. He started playing this tune while reminiscing about the blues singers he used to hear in the Gulf Coast honky-tonks of his youth, then described how he &#8220;happened to truck down to Mobile&#8221; with a pianist named Brocky Johnny:<\/p>\n<p><em>At that time I was supposed to be a very good pool player, and I could slip upon a lot of people playing pool, because I played piano and they thought I devoted all my time to the piano. So we&#8217;d gotten Alabama bound &#8212; t<\/em><em>he frequent saying was, any place that you was going, why, you was supposed<\/em> <em>to be \u201cbound\u201d for that place. So in fact we was Alabama bound, and when I got there I wrote this <\/em><em>tune called \u201cAlabama Bound.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s no reason to believe Morton was the originator of this song, but he sang and played a lovely version and a lot of later singers were inspired by it, including me. In the book, I use it as a hook to discuss Morton&#8217;s travels, and more broadly the way Black musicians and their songs were traveling in the first decades of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-5138\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Alabama-Bound-sheet-music-cover.jpg?resize=204%2C264&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"204\" height=\"264\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Alabama-Bound-sheet-music-cover.jpg?w=309&amp;ssl=1 309w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Alabama-Bound-sheet-music-cover.jpg?resize=232%2C300&amp;ssl=1 232w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 204px) 100vw, 204px\" \/>Several older musicians recalled &#8220;Alabama Bound&#8221; as the earliest blues they heard, and it was the first song published with the word &#8220;blues&#8221; used in a way that suggested a musical category rather than a feeling: the original sheet music cover described it as a &#8220;Rag Time Two Step (Also Known as the Alabama Blues).&#8221;* It was credited to a white New Orleans composer named Robert Hoffman, and appeared in 1909, five years after Morton claimed to have composed it &#8212; and although the New Orleans provenance might seem to support his claim, it also appeared that year as one of the sections of &#8220;Blind Boone&#8217;s Southern Rag Medley No. Two,&#8221; published in Columbia, Missouri by the piano virtuoso <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-5139 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Blind-Boones-Southern-Rag-Medley-No-2.jpg?resize=199%2C260&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"199\" height=\"260\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Blind-Boones-Southern-Rag-Medley-No-2.jpg?w=350&amp;ssl=1 350w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Blind-Boones-Southern-Rag-Medley-No-2.jpg?resize=230%2C300&amp;ssl=1 230w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 199px) 100vw, 199px\" \/>Blind Boone.\u00a0 As I discuss in the book, the Boone medleys are fascinating documents of Black music at the turn of the twentieth century, including tunes like &#8220;Pallet on the Floor&#8221; (which I&#8217;ve made the theme of a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/pallet-on-your-floor-aint-no-telling\/\">previous post<\/a> and also a chapter in <em>Jelly Roll Blues<\/em>), and the pre-blues song variously recorded in later years as &#8220;Payday,&#8221; &#8220;Reuben,&#8221; and other titles.<\/p>\n<p>As for my version, it&#8217;s a similar assemblage of vernacular scraps, with a couple of verses from Morton and others picked up here and there over the last fifty years. Dave Van Ronk was probably one source, which is appropriate, since he was the person who turned me on to Morton&#8217;s blues singing &#8212; I borrowed his ten-inch LP of <em>New Orleans Memories<\/em> and recorded it on cassette, and still play his versions of Morton&#8217;s versions of : &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/buddy-boldens-blues\/\">Buddy Bolden&#8217;s Blues<\/a>,&#8221; &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/mamies-blues\/\">Mamie&#8217;s Blues<\/a>,&#8221; and &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/sweet-substitute\/\">Sweet Substitute<\/a>,&#8221; as well as my own versions of his versions of a couple of other songs that turned into chapter headings: &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wining-boy\/\">Winding Ball<\/a>&#8221; and &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/hesitation-blues\/\">Hesitation Blues<\/a>&#8230;&#8221; and &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/michigan-water\/\">Michigan Water<\/a>&#8230;&#8221; and I&#8217;m beginning to realize that Morton via Van Ronk is kind of my foundation for playing and singing blues. One could do a lot worse.<\/p>\n<p>As I wrote at the outset, I never worked up a performance version of this song, but I&#8217;m headed out on tour for the book and want to be able to play the key songs I cover, and this is how this one fell together. If I keep playing it, I&#8217;m sure it will evolve; meanwhile, I&#8217;m enjoying messing around with it.<\/p>\n<p>*To get the history straight, another white New Orleanian published a song called &#8220;I Got the Blues&#8221; in 1908 that used the form we would now call a 12-bar blues &#8212; but that title suggests the writer was still using <em>blues<\/em> to mean sadness rather than a musical style.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve known &#8220;Alabama Bound&#8221; forever, but never worked it up as a performance piece, and am posting it now because I used it as the theme of chapter one of my new book, Jelly Roll Blues, an exploration of Jelly Roll Morton&#8217;s Library of Congress recordings, the world that nurtured early blues, and the ways &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/alabama-bound\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Alabama Bound (Jelly Roll Morton, and many others)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - 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Over the years, I got used to the idea that if I stayed late enough at his place we would likely end up listening to Morton records (often back to back with Phillipe Koutev's Bulgarian ensemble),\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/jelly-roll-morton-commodore-300x295.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3254,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wining-boy\/","url_meta":{"origin":5136,"position":1},"title":"Winin&#8217; Boy \/ Winding Ball (Jelly Roll Morton)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 9, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"I learned this from Dave Van Ronk, who got it from Jelly Roll Morton, and it's at this point in the Songobiography because my trip south in 1985 included a brief stint with a trad jazz band in Charleston, SC. I hitched down from Southport via Myrtle Beach and don't\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Michael-Tyzack.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1387,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/mamies-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":5136,"position":2},"title":"Mamie&#8217;s Blues (219 Blues)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 15, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"In his notes to this song, Dave Van Ronk wrote, \"Jelly Roll Morton, certainly the greatest jazz composer before Ellington and a singer of incredible subtlety claimed to have invented jazz in 1902. There is little point in argument.\" This was one of Morton's most subtle efforts, and one of\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/BasinSt.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5684,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/give-nobody-jelly-roll\/","url_meta":{"origin":5136,"position":3},"title":"I Ain&#8217;t Gonna Give Nobody None of My Jelly Roll","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 3, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"I have no idea where or when I learned this song, and research provides no clues, because it's been done by everyone from Mamie Smith to Willie Nelson--including Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Cliff Bruner, and a duet version by Johnny Mercer and Bobby Darin. So this post is all going\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Jelly-Roll-sheet-music.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5462,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/doctor-jazz\/","url_meta":{"origin":5136,"position":4},"title":"Doctor Jazz (Jelly Roll Morton)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"November 9, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"I don't know where or when I first heard this song, but I didn't start playing it till I heard Paul Geremia's version. Paul is generally known for playing and singing blues in the tradition of people like Willie McTell and Lemon Jefferson, but he liked to fool around with\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Jellycover-e1710359243890.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5786,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/someday-sweetheart\/","url_meta":{"origin":5136,"position":5},"title":"Someday Sweetheart (Morton and Spikes)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 21, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"This is another I've known for ages, but only started doing regularly when Sandrine joined me on clarinet. It was published in 1919 by the brothers John and Ben \"Reb\" Spikes, but Jelly Roll Morton claimed they got it from him and he got the basic melody from another piano\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/someday-sweetheart-e1748802361743.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/someday-sweetheart-e1748802361743.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/someday-sweetheart-e1748802361743.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/someday-sweetheart-e1748802361743.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/someday-sweetheart-e1748802361743.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5136"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5150,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5136\/revisions\/5150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}