Alabama Bus by Brother Will Hairston
You can read about the background of the Montgomery Bus Boycott on my website. Scroll down to The Civil Rights Movement > The Montgomery Bus Boycott. (https://louisehaynes.com/history/history.html). It will give you important information that will help you understand this song.
You will find the lyrics at: https://genius.com/Brother-will-hairston-the-alabama-bus-lyrics
The song
(433 words)
Alabama Bus was written in 1956 by Brother Will Hairston in Detroit, Michigan, in the U.S.
The song is a kind of story told by a person who was part of the thousands of people who decided they wanted to end segregation on buses in Montgomery Alabama.
Before the bus boycott, both black and white passengers rode the buses, but the blacks had to take only the seats in the back of the bus. If a white passenger got on the bus and there were not seats available, a black person had to stand up and give the white person the seat.
The man told the driver: "My feets are hurtin'" (my feet hurt) The driver told the man to move behind the curtain
Here, curtain refers to the line dividing the white section from the black section of the bus. The position of the "curtain" changed depending on who was riding the bus.
The lyrics go on to talk about Reverend Martin Luther King, who was a strong man, similar to Moses in Israel. Moses was a prophet and leader of the Israelites when they were slaves in Egypt. He led them out of slavery.
A man ain't nothin' but a man could refer to the fact that under slavery in the U.S., black men were called "boy", even as adults. Being called a "man" implies that you are a full human being.(1) The lyrics explain how, like Moses, Dr. King led his people to defeat the segregation laws in the U.S. One way was to support the bus boycott: All of my people gonna walk to work.
The bus company tried to frighten the boycotters by threatening them with arrest: Cause don't you know you broke the anti-boycott law? Many were arrested, and the bus company knew that they did not have the money to pay for their bail to be released.
They had the trial and Clayton Powell was there. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was another leader in the Civil Rights movement. He led a bus boycott in New York much earlier than the one that happened in Montgomery, but it did not receive much media attention. He became a Congressman of New York.
Diggs went down there to go his bail. Charles C. Diggs, Jr. was a Congressman from Michigan. He collected donations and was able to pay the $500 bail for boycotters who were arrested: they put Reverend King in an Alabama jail
Rev. King was born on 15 January, 1929. He went on to become one of the most famous leaders of non-violent protest in American history.
VOCABULARY
- segregation 人種隔離
- passenger 乗客
- prophet 預言者
- slave 奴隷
- imply 意味
- threaten 脅す
- bail 保釈金
You can learn more about Brother Will Hairston at:
https://marshamusic.wordpress.com/the-alabama-bus/
marshamusic.wordpress.com is a great site to learn about music of the 1960s!
(1) You'll also notice this in the song Blowin' in the Wind in which Bob Dylan asks the question, How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? Meaning how many marches do people have to do in order to be respected?
Pronunciation extra!
The way we write and the way we speak is often quite different. For example, "Do you want to…" is often pronounced [dʒə'wa:na:] which could be written as djawanna. (We don't usually write it this way, however.)
In this song, there are a couple of examples of this, especially in American pronunciation:
wanna = want to gonna = going to
Another example is the way we pronounce words ending in "ing". We often pronounce a word such as wishing as ['wɪʃn] and sometimes write it as wishin', dropping the final "g". In academic or business writing, we would spell out the word(s), but in novels and songs, you might find the shortened versions.
