On Sunday, September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls and injuring 22 other worshippers. The incident had a profound effect on many Americans. One of them was John Coltrane, one of the leading Jazz saxophonists in the 1950s and 60s, when American Jazz was at its commercial peak.
In “Alabama,” Coltrane asks us to bear witness to this hole in the ground, which is also a hole in America’s story, which is also a hole in the heart of black Americans. He wants us to grieve alongside him at this absence. The quartet recorded the track in November 1963, two months after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, made an absence of four little black girls.
