NEW ALL-TOO-TRUE-BLUE STATE HISTORIES (HISTORICAL PARODIES - ALABAMA)

Excerpt from “The New All-too-True-Blue History of Alabama”

TIME IMMEMORIAL – Ungulates and Mound Builders

The first souls in Alabama were Ungulates. The first humans in Alabama were the Mound Builders. They lived in Moundville, at the Moundville archaeological site.

Those silly Mound Builders spent all of their time making and eating Mounds candy bars, and building humongous mound-shaped storage areas for them (which they referred to as Mound Mountains), on top of which they erected their domiciles.

That is not an exaggeration. They spent all of their time making and eating Mounds bars, and constructing mound-shaped objects. That explains why they went extinct. It was a self-inflicted eradication, but at least they passed out of existence doing what they enjoyed the most; they left with a smile on their faces (albeit a rather goofy one).

Enough of those buffoons. Next came the Europeans.

1702 — Capitol of New France on the Mobile River

The French established a fort on the Mobile river. For the following nine years, Fort Louis served as the capitol of what the fortbuilders brazenly referred to as “New France.”

After the fort was flooded (you’ve got to expect flooding when you build something next to a river) in 1711, a new fort was built on higher ground, at a point which would eventually become the settlement of Mobile – the first permanent Euro-American settlement in Alabama.

A club they called “Big Jacks” was built there a bit later.

Here follows a photo-realistic rendering of the fort:

Believe it or not, Fort Louis was named for Louis Armstrong, who was the famed “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy from Company C” stationed there

1809 – Sequoyah Creates a Written Form of Cherokee

Starting in 1809, Sequoyah began creating a system of writing for his lingo (Cherokee) in Alabama. Rather than creating a symbol for each word (his first idea), or one for each letter (such as most languages do), he compromised and created a symbol for each syllable in the spoken Cherokee language.

This meant that Sequoyah ended up with a written language comprised of 86 characters, each character corresponding to one of the 86 syllables used in that lingua india.

To teach his method, Sequoyah then invented the piano, making sure it had 86 keys (one to correspond with each Cherokee syllable symbol). In this way, Cherokees can “talk” to each other by playing the keyboards (but the piano is not the only Rosetta Stone for Cherokees; communication amongst them is also made possible via the pipe organ, harpsichord, etc. - anything with 86 notes). This leads to a lot of mirth in mixed (Cherokee/non-Cherokee) company, as the Cherokee can freely share their wry observations on any Euro-Americans present with one another.

If you ever see a Cherokee person tickling the ivories or playing some other keyboard instrument and smiling, this is probably what’s going on.

In fact, here’s a sculpture of Sequoyah doing this very thing. While his friend Rita Coolidge was tickling the ivories, he was transcribing what she was saying about her cousin Calvin (who was -- despite being her father’s brother -- not a Cherokee) into his native (no pun intended) tongue:

Another top-secret message transcribed from Rita’s ivory-tickling was, “The business of America is funny business”

1814 – Jackson Beats the Bushes for the Creeks

In 1814, when he should have been focused on whipping the British in the town of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson (great-great-grandfather of Reggie) was fighting Creek Indians – both those who had supported him in earlier forays against other tribes, and those who hadn’t.

Impressed by Jackson’s military skill, acumen, and treachery, the Creeks ceded nearly half of Alabama to the Ewe-Knighted States (creeks, rivers, land, mounds, and all).

This means that if you look at a colored section of the map below (at random), the chances are 50-50 that the area you’re gazing at had been owned by the Creek until Jackson sent them up themselves without a paddle.

Half of the colored pieces-parts in the map above are former Creek holdings

. . .

The complete (32-page) book “The New All-too-True-Blue History of Alabama” is available here.

You can listen to this excerpt of “The New All-too-True-Blue History of Alabama” here:

Clay Shannon is also the author of the book “the Zany Time Travels of Warble McGorkle”