“Alabamy Bound”
Song by Ray Charles
The 1924 vaudeville song “Alabamy Bound” opens Ray Charles’ first ABC album, The Genius Hits The Road from 1960, on which every song mentions a place in the United States.
“Alabamy Bound” was written by Ray Henderson, Bud Green, and Buddy DeSylva and became most famous in a recording by Al Jolson. (Another song, “I’m Alabama Bound”, was made famous by artists such as Jelly Roll Morton, Lead Belly, and Lonnie Donegan but is a separate and unrelated song, even though, confusingly, its title has occasionally been rendered with the same vernacular misspelling as this one.)
Ray Charles’ version of “Alabamy Bound” is short (under two minutes) and as the first song on Side 1 appears to serve as a kind of introduction to the rest of the album. With its blasts of energetic brass and busy jazz drum fills, the performance explodes out of the gate with all the enthusiasm of a railroad journey that’s just beginning. All aboard; new adventures await!
Ray’s vocals, curiously, aren’t quite as peppy as the music, although he was famously capable of wild, abandoned singing. He chooses to let the band supply most of the kinetic energy while he concentrates on carefully delivering the infinitely light-hearted lyrics: just a year earlier he darkly believed to his soul; now he is looking forward to “planting my tootsies in an upper berth” and explaining that he “don’t want no heebie-jeebies hanging around”.
Producer Sid Feller would later remark how surprised he was that throughout this album Ray tended to stick to the melodies of the tunes exactly as written, eschewing extemporization and avoiding taking liberties with the tunes. Perhaps Ray was nervous about the expectations of his new label, although he rarely if ever seemed swayed by external forces in this way. Maybe he just thought it worked musically.
The saxes and trumpets, arranged by Ralph Burns, throw out fierce bolts of muscular notes amid and around the sneakily playful saxophone solo, which is like a little kid running around a choo-choo train dodging unamused grown-ups and getting in the way of the staff walking down the hallways. It’s the rambunctious swing of “Alabamy Bound” that helps put the stamp of Ray Charles on it.
As a choice of material and the lead-off song, “Alabamy Bound” also serves to show people that Ray would be not only freeing himself to widen the musical range of his own records but refusing to stay within the narrow confines of the rhythm and blues that had made him famous at Atlantic in the previous decade. He had already served notice of this impulse on the 1959 Genius Of Ray Charles LP, but now he was diving in fully.
Listen to “Alabamy Bound”
Songs on The Genius Hits The Road