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The city of Birmingham has inspired many musical tributes over the years, from the pens and instruments of natives and non-natives alike.  For a few of these Birmingham songs, the place name may be more or less inconsequential, offering a convenient rhyme and rhythm and a generic southern locale; most Birmingham songs, though, are invested with a deeper sense of place and homegrown experience.  While some extol wholeheartedly the draw and pleasure of the Birmingham life, others confront both the pain and the power of the city’s legacy.  Taken together, these songs capture a broad sweep of our city’s story and sound.

For its first issue, Pavo is proud to present the twenty all-time greatest Birmingham songs.  The songs below are not arranged according to any strategy of ranking, and are not listed chronologically, but instead simply offer the ultimate Magic City playlist.  Check back each day for a new song.

20. “Birmingham,” Randy Newman (1974).  On 1972’s Sail Away, Randy Newman’s satirical and sometimes scathing voice inhabited such songs as the title cut, in which a slave trader, like a tacky salesman, hawks America to potential slaves; “Political Science,” which espouses a blanket American foreign policy of dropping “the big one” to “see what happens”; and “God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind),” in which a cynical, contemptuous Creator torments his people with plagues and gross destruction simply because He can, and because His ridiculous victims will, absurdly, love Him anyway.  Later, Newman’s only real hit, the Jonathan-Swiftian “Short People,” would inspire protests among groups of, well, short people who took the song’s satire seriously.  But Newman’s sarcasm, bite, and voice-throwing shenanigans were at their sharpest on the concept album Good Old Boys, 1974’s follow-up to the critically-acclaimed Sail Away.  At first glance Newman may seem a snarky outsider further maligning a cracker culture which, for all of its faults, may not deserve cheap shots from a far-off California hipster.  But Good Old Boys is a complicated, challenging, and empathetic work which has become a southern classic.  The opening track, “Rednecks,” takes the perspective of one of the good old boys of the album’s title, and does something that only Randy Newman would attempt on a could-be pop album: it crafts a catchy chorus—one that gets stuck in your head, one with which you are immediately compelled to sing along—around the phrase “we’re keeping the niggers down.”  And then, just when we are ready to put the album’s rednecks in an easy and predictable box, our sense of moral superiority all afire, we encounter the record’s second track: “Birmingham.”

Again the perspective is first person, the song’s speaker a steel mill worker (the same redneck-speaker of the previous song?) with a wife named Mary but called Marie and a dog named Dan.  Again, the chorus is catchy and singable, proudly proclaiming Birmingham the “greatest city in Alabam.”  If Newman’s work drips often with irony and satire, and if the song immediately previous had lambasted the South and its unthinking rednecks, “Birmingham” feels disarmingly, perplexingly genuine: the way Newman sings “the greatest city in Alabam,” he may as well be proclaiming it the greatest city on the planet.  (The song is convincing enough that Del McCoury could later cover it as a bluegrass song—straight-faced, no trace of irony or condescension anywhere—and again it works.)  Two tracks into Good Old Boys, then, we are forced to reconsider what Randy Newman is up to.  By the time the record’s first side is over, we have been able to somehow, simultaneously laugh at, loathe, pity, feel for, laugh with, and even identify(!) with Newman’s rednecks: they have played into and quickly escaped our stereotype, confronted us and confounded us as real, complex personalities.  Despite everything else, even the worst, for three minutes and twenty seconds we can believe whole-heartedly that “There’s no place like Birmingham,” and that for this place we are lucky.

This one could be our city’s theme song.

(P.S. If we left your favorite Birmingham song off this list, let us know, and no hard feelings.  For those readers who prefer their lists ranked, here is a tentative Top 5, taking into account three primary factors: anthemic potential, historical impact, and sheer musical goodness: 5. “Birmingham Jail”; 4. “Great Day for Me”; 3. “Birmingham Bounce”; 2. “Birmingham” (Newman); and 1. “Tuxedo Junction.”)

 

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1. “Birmingham Boys,” Birmingham Jubilee Singers (1926).  In the 1920s and ‘30s the Birmingham area boasted an African-American gospel quartet tradition whose impact stretched far: for years to come the harmony styles shaped in Jefferson County would prove a lasting well of influence for African-American vocal groups, both sacred and secular, across the country.  Several local groups—The Famous Blue Jays, the Dunham Jubilee Singers, the Bessemer Sunset Four, the Kings of Harmony, and more—recorded commercially, and many toured the country professionally, spreading the gospel of the Birmingham Sound.  By the 1940s traveling Birmingham groups had established bases in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, Cleveland, Dallas, and other cities, building wide followings and effectively changing the landscape of American gospel.  One of the most successful of these outfits was the Birmingham Jubilee Singers, led by Charles Bridges, a quartet-trainer who had helped mold a number of groups in the local tradition.  “Birmingham Boys,” the flipside of their first record, was the Singers’ calling card.  A secular song in a mostly secular repertoire, “Birmingham Boys” is nonetheless typical of the area’s harmony-rich, a cappella quartet style, and it fittingly introduces new listeners to the home of the Jubilee movement.  “Birmingham, Birmingham, Birmingham boys are we,” the lyrics proudly announce: “if you could live a Birmingham life, how happy you would be.”

2. “Fat Sam from Birmingham,” Louis Jordan (1947).  One of many songs to make much of the easy rhyme of “Birmingham” with “Alabam,” “Fat Sam” is a swinging number about a larger-than-life character (“as wide as he is tall”) who hangs out in “front of Shorter’s bar” and, genial hook-up to whatever mischief you might need, serves as the ultimate good-times ambassador.  It is pure and classic jumping ‘40s jive, shot through with Jordan’s characteristic relish.  Not to be confused with Western-swinger Hank Penny’s “Big Footed Sam” from Birmingham (“his size fourteens really rock the floor…”), which is not so bad a tune itself.

3. “Birmingham Daddy,” Gene Autry (1931).  A perfect little recording, among the very first sides cut by future cowboy-crooner Gene Autry.  Before rising to Hollywood horse-opera stardom or entering his jingle-jangle jingles into the Christmas-pop canon, Autry recorded his share of earthier “hillbilly” blues.  These first Autry recordings clearly evoked the style of the immensely popular Jimmie Rodgers, borrowing Rodgers’ yodel and some of his repertoire, but managed to showcase a voice that was nonetheless unique, and eminently listenable—edgier, too, than Autry’s soon-to-develop good-guy image would allow his future output.  Among these early recordings is “Birmingham Daddy,” an Autry composition blessed by the jazz-infused banjo backing of string virtuoso Roy Smeck.  The song deserves quoting: “If love was liquor, and I could drink, I’d be drunk all the time / I’d go back to town, in Birmingham, with the loving mama of mine.”  Yodel-a-hee-hey.

4. “Birmingham Bounce,” Hardrock Gunter (1950).  “In the heart of Dixie, in Alabam, there’s a place we love, called Birmingham.”  So began Hardrock Gunter’s “Birmingham Bounce,” recorded in 1950 for the Bama record label—and so did Birmingham partake in the birth of rock and roll.  The recording became a regional hit, Gunter’s first and biggest, and riding its success the Birmingham singer toured the Southeast, playing in empty airplane hangars, other venues apparently too cramped for his crowds.  Gunter’s thing was part Western swing, part boogie-woogie—“a funny little rhythm with a solid sound,” the song said—and an immediate precursor to rock and roll.  (Gunter himself was one of the first to use the phrase “rock and roll,” in 1950’s”Gonna Dance All Night,” recorded soon after the “Bounce.”  It would still be another year before Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner cut “Rocket 88,” often lauded today as the “first” rock and roll record; four years still until Elvis; five until Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.”)  “Birmingham Bounce” spawned over 20 cover versions, extending the song’s reach far beyond Gunter’s tour circuit.  Quick on the heels of the original, Red Foley took it to the number-one position on the country charts, and a striking variety of musicians released their own versions: country musicians Leon McAuliffe and Tex Williams; rhythm-and-blues pianist Amos Milburn; Big Band leaders Lionel Hampton and Tommy Dorsey.  And so it was that in the days leading immediately into rock and roll, all over the country people were gearing up and getting primed—bouncing—Birmingham-style.

5. “Great Day for Me,” Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights Choir (circa 1963).  In 1956, in the wake of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, state officials banned the NAACP from Alabama.  Seeing the need for a new group that would challenge discrimination, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth spearheaded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.  Where the NAACP had used the courts to fight racist laws, the ACMHR called for more of a direct, confrontational, and community-rooted approach.  In 1963, the group teamed with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to launch “Project C” (for “Confrontation”), a period of direct and sustained demonstrations in the Birmingham streets.  From April 3 to May 10, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church served as the home base for the demonstrations. Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor and Birmingham law enforcement responded violently, sparking outrage across the country.

As it did in all the movement’s battlegrounds, music provided significant fuel for the mass meetings and demonstrations in Birmingham.  The ACMHR Choir, led by Carlton Reese, performed nightly at the Sixteenth Street church.  One of their songs, “Great Day for Me,” adapted a gospel standard to the Birmingham moment:

Great day for me, great day for me
I’m so happy, I want to be free
Since Jesus came to Birmingham, I’m happy as can be
Oh, great day for me.

Neither Birmingham, nor the rest of the nation, would be the same again.

6. “Birmingham Mistake,” Sammi Smith (1973).  Sammi Smith scored a major hit in 1971 with her version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” a success which should have marked the start of a celebrated career; sadly, and despite some powerful performances to her credit, Smith never quite pulled off the larger success that her deep, sultry voice may have deserved.  “Birmingham Mistake” is the story of a woman whose bad luck began with her own unwanted birth and her subsequent abandonment, in a basket, on a run-down Birmingham doorstep.  The singer’s plight hinges on the chance turns of her fate, beginning with the sorry doorstep selected by the mother she never knew: “I wish now that I’d been put down,” Smith sings, “in a better part of this town, when she got rid of a Birmingham mistake.”  Despite some uninspired lyrics (“Life ain’t been a bed of roses / People still look down their noses / I was born without the icing on the cake”), Smith’s world-weary, soul-drenched delivery manages to give the story real credibility and pathos.  Nobody sang country soul so forsaken and low as Sammi Smith.

7. “Birmingham Blues,” The Birmingham Jug Band (1930).  A raucous instrumental stomp-down from a great, forgotten Birmingham band.  The Birmingham Jug Band recorded only eight songs at a single date in 1930, and though the band’s membership remains cloudy, the group’s prominent, blustering harmonica may be that of Jaybird Coleman, the Bessemer harp-blower who recorded a number of impressive solo sides in his own right.  Ben Curry, a medicine-show entertainer also known as “Bogus Blind” Ben Covington (“Bogus” because he could in fact see), was likely another member of the group, alongside other players known to us only as “Dr. Ross,” “One-Armed Dave,” “Honeycup” (on jug) and “New Orleans Slide” (washboard).  The hell-for-leather harmonica, steady low-blowing jug, and a wonderfully ragged mandolin give the tunes a drive unsurpassed by any of the era’s other jug bands.  Almost half of the songs recorded by the Birmingham group consist of essentially the same melody—their “Birmingham Blues” closely echoes their “German Blues,” “Giving it Away,” “Getting Ready for Trial,” and others—but each time and with some variation the band proves it can play the hell out of that particular tune.  Other instrumental odes to the city would be recorded in later years (Duke Ellington’s “Birmingham Breakdown” is a good one, besides the two discussed elsewhere in this Top Twenty), but Birmingham has never sounded better, freer, or wilder than in this blues.  (Anyone out there, incidentally, who believes the worn stereotype that the music of the blues is a depressive and mournful thing had better listen to this record and get right.)

8. “Alabama,” John Coltrane (1963).  John Coltrane’s “Alabama,” recorded in November 1963 for the Live at Birdland album, stands today as one of the most celebrated works of an established master.  According to most commentators, it is at least in part a reflection on the deaths of four Birmingham girls, killed by explosion only two months earlier.  Some listeners have claimed that Coltrane built the composition on the cadences of a speech by Martin Luther King, possibly his funeral oration for those girls.  Coltrane himself was more oblique in defining his inspiration: “It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me.”  What comes out of Coltrane is profound, mournful, and—ultimately, above all—beautiful.  LeRoi Jones, in the original liner notes: “I didn’t realize until now what a beautiful word Alabama is.  That is one function of art, to reveal beauty, common or uncommon, uncommonly.”  The song works in a kind of tragic idiom that parallels Shakespeare or Sophocles.  Coltrane exposes us to the loss, the waste and hurt of human experience, but, as in the great tragedies, we can see reflected in the suffering suffering’s own antithesis: in the face of our capacity for destruction we remember again our capacity also for beauty, our profound potential to do better.  Coltrane’s “Alabama,” like any art that lasts, transcends its historical moment, opening up the broader human experience, and leading us further toward understanding.

9. “Birmingham Jail,” Darby and Tarlton (1927).  The most ubiquitous of all Birmingham song lyrics is the old, slow-waltzing ballad verse, “Write me a letter, send it by mail / Send it in care of the Birmingham jail.”  The tune, commonly known as “Down in the Valley,” was a traditional folk song dating back before the turn of the 20th century, but in the 1920s the song, with the famous verse, became equally well-known as “Birmingham Jail.”  The addition was apparently the work of Jimmie Tarlton, who claimed to have spent time in the jail on charges of moonshining.  Tarlton recorded it in 1927 with his musical partner Tom Darby, and the song and its flipside—“Columbus Stockade Blues”—both became major sellers and staples of the southern country repertoire.  The duo’s success with the tune moved them to record it again the following year, releasing it as “Birmingham Jail No. 2,” and in 1930 they gave the public more of what it wanted with an entirely new composition, titled “New Birmingham Jail.”  The Magic City seemed to capture the imagination of these singers, who also recorded songs titled “Birmingham Town” (which boldly announces of San Francisco, “She’ll never be a town like Birmingham”) and the instrumental “Birmingham Rag.”  “Birmingham Jail,” meanwhile, would be often recorded: by Alabama’s Stripling Brothers, by Eddy Arnold, by Peggy Lee, by Roy Acuff and Leadbelly and more.  Little remembered today, Darby and Tarlton recorded over 60 sides between 1927 and 1933, helped pioneer the use of the slide guitar, and, with their heavy-harmonied, often-bluesy sound, proved influential to the development of country music.  Interestingly, the Birmingham jail would become world-famous a few decades later, not for a letter sent to it but a letter sent from it, Martin Luther King’s historic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

10. “15 Miles from Birmingham” and “Back to Birmingham,” the Delmore Brothers (1938, 1940).  Another song about Birmingham letters (“Got a letter from Birmingham just today”) and Birmingham jails (“Oh, the jails in Birmingham sure are gay”), the Delmore Brothers’ “Back to Birmingham” is loaded with nostalgia; even in those jails, the song reminisces, “they give you conditioned air.”  For all the wanderlust rambling of their repertoire (“Leavin’ On That Train,” “Ramblin’ Minded Blues,”  “Honey, I’m Ramblin’ Away,” and a whole catalogue of songs about rivers and railroads), the Delmore Brothers sang often also of a sharp yearning for home.  “Back to Birmingham,” though quick-tempoed and sometimes humorous, reflects a characteristic Delmore sadness, a longing for rootedness.  “It’s the best place I have found,” the brothers sing of Birmingham, one of many hometowns in their real, nomadic career: “gonna quit my running round.”  Born in Elkmont, Alabama, into a family of sharecroppers, the Delmores proved a profoundly original and influential country music act in the 1930s and ‘40s, known for soft harmonies, speedy guitar work, and a bottomless songbag of brother Alton’s sophisticated compositions.  Both of their Birmingham songs contain all of the classic Delmore ingredients: the interplay of guitars and harmonies, the competing themes of wandering and home, the competing tones of amusement and deep-seated sadness.  From “15 Miles”: “So sing a song, it won’t be long ‘til I come back again; I’ll ramble back again.”

11. “Tuxedo Junction,” Erskine Hawkins (1939).  In the first decades of the 20th century, Ensley’s “Tuxedo Junction,” marked by the intersection of two streetcar lines, was a small but busy commercial hub, and a center of African American social life.  In its heyday the Junction boasted a string of shops (one of them sold tuxes), black fraternal organizations, and night clubs, wherein dancers moved to live music from Birmingham’s best jazz players.  People came from all over, the song said, “to get jive, that southern sound”: “to dance the night away.”

Trumpeter Erskine Hawkins was born in Birmingham and attended Industrial High School, where he studied under the legendary music instructor Fess Whatley.  In college he became bandleader to the already-celebrated Bama State Collegians, whose members followed him to Harlem in 1934 to become the Erskine Hawkins Orchestra.  In 1939 they cut “Tuxedo Junction,” an instrumental number which Hawkins named in honor of the hometown scene where he had once played.  Originally relegated to B-side status (behind “Gin Mill Special”), “Junction” surpassed expectations to become Hawkins’ most popular song.  New York lyricist Buddy Feyne, working from Hawkins’ description of the place, added words.  Glenn Miller recorded it and it hit number one.  An anthem of the World War II era, it jumped and swung from jukeboxes across the country, but nowhere more proudly or frequently than in Ensley.  In 1940, a Birmingham Post article described the song’s constant playing on Junction nickelodians: “A shoemaker down the street drives his nails all day long to the swing of the music.  Waiters in a café on the other corner do their jobs to its beat.  Even the dishes seem to catch the rhythm of the piece.  A barber up the street cuts hair to it.”  The reporter continued: “All that music means nickels coming in, and Tuxedo Junction’s cash drawers can use some nickels now.  It’s not the corner it used to be.”  Sure enough, though the dance halls and businesses still stood in 1940, the tune was then already an homage to fading glory.  Streetcar service ended, and the Junction was no longer a junction.  All but one of the original Junction buildings (the historic Nixon building) were razed.  When segregation came to Ensley, white residents pulled out in large numbers.  The steel plant, long the heart of the Ensley economy, closed down.  Poverty, crime, and homelessness went up.  In the ‘80s the Nixon building was revived briefly as a music venue, this time for punk rockers, but that too passed.

Today the famous tune lingers as a reminder of a heyday past, and as a call to rise again.  Around Ensley “Tuxedo Junction” is not yet forgotten: this summer the Erskine Hawkins Park, situated behind the Nixon Building, hosted its 24th Function at the Junction, an annual music festival (Hawkins himself was a regular participant at the event until his death in 1993).  Plans for a Nixon Cultural Center, spotlighting the spot’s cultural legacy, are also underway.

12. “Birmingham,” Drive-By Truckers (2002).  The Drive-By Truckers’ “Birmingham” is a sweat-stained and beery anthem to the roots and future and passion and swelter of the city.  “Most of my family came from Birmingham,” it says; “I can feel their presence on the street / Vulcan Park’s seen its share of troubled times, but the city won’t admit defeat.”  Frontman Patterson Hood variously drawls and slurs and yells and moans the lyrics which near the end of the song turn into a scraggy incantation guaranteed at any live show to really stir up the hometown crowd.  The song is a part of the Truckers’ 2001 double-album, Southern Rock Opera, a loving and unflinching statement of the “southern thing” at the turn of the 21st century.  The album offers a loose, semi-fictional storyline that plunges deep into southern mythology and identity, pulling into its scope Muscle Shoals soul, the Civil Rights struggle, the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane-crash, booze and family and the Devil—and, out of it all, loud and intemperate, gut-busting Rock.  Birmingham figures prominently into the whole thing, nowhere more so than in this blistering hymn.  Patterson Hood, deep into his spell-casting, is just about screaming by now—“Magic’s City’s magic’s getting stronger”—and the song concludes: “No man should ever feel he don’t belong, in Birmingham.”  The song ends and the hometown crowd is in a frenzy; somehow its members too have become as sweat-soaked as the band.

13. “Birmingham, Alabama,” R.B. Greaves (1969). R.B. Greaves, nephew of soul-stirrer Sam Cooke, had one of the least likely bios in soul music history.  Born Ronald Bertram Aloysius Greaves III on an Air Force Base in Guyana, South America, he was raised in the United States, on a Seminole Indian Reservation.  In the ‘60s he relocated to England, where he fronted a group called Sonny Childe and the T&Ts, before returning to America to pursue an R&B career and a brief flirtation with country music—but ultimately joining the ranks of the one-hit-wonder for his only real success, 1969’s “Take a Letter, Maria.”   Recorded at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, “Maria” was itself something of an oddity for a hit record, framed as the first-person narration of a businessman who, the previous evening, caught his wife cheating and now dictates to his secretary his plans to get a divorce and split town.  In the process of dictation, he realizes his love for the secretary and incorporates her into his escape plans, beginning with a romantic dinner after work.  (Maria is ambiguously Hispanic, and the song’s mariachi horns suggest that perhaps the two, in their “new life,” will head somewhere south of the border.)  On the whole, Greaves’ work languished between the poles of Lou-Rawlsian smooth pop and the earthier soul for which Muscle Shoals was better known, and beyond “Maria” Greaves met with little success, his recorded output limited and spotty.
 
Of interest here, though, is another song from the self-titled 1969 album that gave the world “Maria.”  Written by Murray MacLeod and Stuart Margolin and covered also by Harry Belafonte, “Birmingham, Alabama” isn’t exactly hit material, but it’s catchy enough—and the way Greaves consistently belts out the city and state name will at least make any local listener feel good.  The song’s best line: “Jesus says, ‘You’ll be shuffling coal till your dying day – in Birmingha-a-am, Alabama.’”

14. “A Small Town They Call Bessemer,” Jazz Gillum and Memphis Slim (1961).  A separate, if shorter, list might be compiled of the best Bessemer songs—among them, Ma Rainey’s “Bessemer Bound Blues,” Tampa Red’s “Bessemer Blues,” and Big Joe Williams’s “Bessemer Baby.”  The best of the Bessemer songs, arguably, is “A Small Town They Call Bessemer,” in which the singer threatens to get “mean and evil” and move from Bessemer “back to Birmingham” if his woman doesn’t treat him right.  Gillum had recorded the song back in the ‘30s as “Birmingham Blues,” but the 1961 version benefits from Memphis Slim’s funky electric organ vamping and rolling and jumping beneath Gillum’s drawl.

15. “The Magic City,” Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra (1965).  Sun Ra biographer John Szwed contends that “1965 was a turning point” for Sun Ra’s music; and that year’s album The Magic City, Szwed notes, “was the clearest signal of the change.”  If Sun Ra had already played at the outer limits of jazz, here he stretched his soloists and listeners further into unmapped experience.  The album’s title track swallowed the entire first side of the record, sketching for a near half-hour a sonic landscape that is part Birmingham, part outer-space: it was a kind of homecoming, but on Sun Ra’s terms, a revisioning of the city in which the man and his music were first born.  Sun Ra plays (sometimes simultaneously) piano and Clavioline, an early synthesizer evoking the ominous explorations of late-night black-and-white space flicks.  The instruments play against and with each other, interacting also with the comings and goings of bass, drums, clarinet, piccolo, and flute.  Fifteen minutes in, the performance explodes, instruments erupting at once.  There are five saxophones, sometimes screaming.   Throughout the piece, as in much of Sun Ra’s work, an alternate universe emerges from the shifting layers of sound.  In the Arkestra’s hands, the Magic City bends, opens, and expands—a city of magic, of Magi, of imagination—to become portal into a deeper cosmos.  (For more on Sun Ra, see the feature article in this issue.)

16. “Backin’ to Birmingham,” Lester Flatt (1972). The story: A novice trucker, unable to get his rig out of reverse, backs a semi full of steel from Chicago to Birmingham.  A throwaway novelty number, but performed with authority and good humor by bluegrass legend Lester Flatt.

(Several other road songs, while we’re on the subject, make stops in Birmingham: Emmylou Harris’ “Boulder to Birmingham”; John Hiatt’s “Train to Birmingham”; Keith Whitley’s “Birmingham Turnaround.”  Birmingham occupies a significant space in the center of Chuck Berry’s hit “Promised Land,” arguably the best of all American road songs.  In that song “motor trouble” turns into “a struggle, halfway across Alabam,” the Greyhound bus breaking down and leaving the singer “stranded in downtown Birmingham.”  Mirroring the tumultuous 1961 route of the Freedom Riders from Virginia to New Orleans, Berry’s song positions Birmingham at the heart of an unwelcoming South, a stopover point decidedly in contrast to the ultimate “Promised Land” of the title.  The song ends with the singer boarding a plane and finally touching down (“Swing low, chariot, come down easy”) in Los Angeles.)

17. “Birmingham Black Bottom,” Charlie Johnson’s Original Paradise Ten, featuring Monette Moore (1927).  “Stompin’… rompin’ … do that Birmingham stomp!”: it is a tune which, literally, demands dancing.  The “Black Bottom” was a popular dance style that, during the Jazz Age heyday spread from urban black America into the flapper culture and—briefly, at least—into the mainstream national consciousness.  The term “Black Bottom” played on several levels at once, allowing for it a popular and flexible usage within the jazz vocabulary.  Many black neighborhoods in urban spaces across the country picked up the label “Black Bottom,” and from one or more of these “bottoms” emerged a dance of the same name.  In an era of overnight dance crazes, this one caught on, popularized in such recordings as “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and Jelly Roll Morton’s “Black Bottom Stomp.”  (The term’s further, punning meaning is evident in Rainey’s declaration, “Wait until you see me do my big black bottom, it’ll put you in a trance.”)  In the late 1920s vocalist Monette Moore sang with pianist and bandleader Charlie Johnson’s Paradise Ten, the house band at Small’s Paradise, one of Harlem’s top jazz clubs.  Their “Birmingham Black Bottom,” while lacking much more than a titular connection to the city, has everything a listener, or a dancer, could want from the black bottom tradition—a lively beat, boisterous and wailing instrumentation, gleeful vocals, and sweet invitation to sheer abandon.

18. “Birmingham Bull” (“Didn’t He Ramble”), Ernie Marrs (1963).  Matching new words to old tunes was a common practice among participants of the Civil Rights Movement (as with the revised “Great Day for Me,” # 5 above).  Nineteenth-century spirituals were revived, their lyrics often adjusted to link the contemporary freedom struggle to the struggle begun in slavery (“Oh, Freedom,” “Gospel Plow,” “Wade in the Water”); union songs lent their activist stances to the Civil Rights cause (“Which Side Are You On?”); commercial pop songs were retooled to reflect the times (“Hit the Road, Jack” as “Get Your Rights, Jack,” “The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)” as “Freedom’s Coming and It Won’t Be Long,” even “Land of 1,000 Dances” reclaimed as a freedom chant).   A number of topical folksingers emerged from the Northeastern college and coffeehouse scenes to give their hands and voices to the movement, adding still more songs to the cause’s songbook.  Ernie Marrs (best known for his version of “Plastic Jesus”) recreated the old standby “Birmingham Jail” as “Bull Connor’s Jail” in the crucial year of 1963.  The same year he borrowed from the traditional English ballad “The Darby Ram” and the New Orleans Dixieland staple “Didn’t He Ramble” to cut down to size one of the most notorious villains of the movement.  Pete Seeger picked up Marrs’ song in Birmingham and performed it in June of ‘63 at his famous Carnegie Hall concert.  The protest-rooted Broadside Magazine ran the song the same month.  A few of Marrs’ verses:

The song ends with this advice:

But if you see a Bull, sir, that tries to throw a scare
Just give his tail a pull, sir, and let out all his air

19. “Sweet Home Alabama,” Lynyrd Skynyrd (1974).  What do we say of “Sweet Home”?  While some would doubtless argue that it does not belong on this list at all, others would rank it as the ultimate Birmingham song—even if its reference to the city is brief (and, well, complicated).  Whether you love “Sweet Home Alabama” or hate it, or feel for it a simultaneous attraction and revulsion that is neither love nor hate or is, maybe, both—surely, in the end, you must confront it as one of our city’s unavoidable songs, perhaps even its defining song.

“Sweet Home Alabama” is, after all, on most of our license plates now (replacing another tune, “Stars Fell on Alabama,” a song most Alabamians have by now forgotten).  This song, moreover, is in our blood.  American tourists—people who have never set foot in this state—will hear it suddenly in far-off countries and will identify, will feel a kind of patriotic rush, and will sing along.  Because the song isn’t even about Alabama anymore, if it ever was; it’s about home. And it is catchy, and it is loud.  A few years ago, a Birmingham tourism group came close to adopting “Sweet Home Alabama” as its own motto, adjusting the lyrics to inspire both pride and commerce: “in Birmingham,” a proposed slogan ran, “they love the shopping.”  I wish I was kidding.

That is, after all, the crucial line—the controversial line, the one that incorporates (for we are the they) all of us.  Forget the mythic Neil Young squabble (a legend artfully debunked on the Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera, mentioned above).  What are we to do with a line like “In Birmingham, they love the governor,” recorded during the long reign of George Wallace?  Some Skynyrd apologists have claimed that the doo-woppy chant, “Boo, boo, boo!” which follows that line signals the band’s actual rejection of Wallace and all that he stood for.  But surely that is far-fetched, revisionist and wishful thinking.  So what do we do with the line?  Does liking the song mean loving the governor?  Does loving the governor have to mean supporting his segregationist poses?  Or is this merely a celebration of populism—or a defiant pride in who we are, despite all our obvious warts?  What, exactly, does it mean when Alabama football fans adopt a song (Roll, Tide, Roll!) that claims support for the man who famously stood in their own schoolhouse door to block black arrivals?  Does the song speak to Wallace’s alleged repentance and transformation, already underway by 1974?  Ambiguities pile higher with the song’s next mysterious line, “We all did what we could do.”  If only we knew what this meant, the song’s mysteries would stand revealed.  And, really, how can Watergate not bother these guys?  Is that swaggering indifference okay, even in a pop song?

What I guess I am saying is: should my conscience bother me if this song is, defiantly, in my bones?  What does that song, and that line, mean for Birminghamians now?

I have written more about this song than I meant to.  The upshot: “Home” is a complicated thing.

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