“Alabama Song” by The Doors

When the Doors recorded "Alabama Song", they were reaching a long way back, to German-language theater of the 1920s. Elisabeth Hauptmann wrote the words in English on behalf of her close collaborator Bertolt Brecht, who published them in his 1927 Hauspostille, a send-up of a book of Martin Luther's sermons. Franz Servatius Bruinier set it to music first; Kurt Weill then adapted it for the 1927 Mahagonny-Songspiel and used it again in Brecht and Weill's 1930 opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, where Jenny and her fellow prostitutes sing it in the first act.

Everything around it was in German, but the song kept Hauptmann's English all the way through, so it needed no translation once a rock band picked it up. It also goes by "Whisky Bar" and "Moon of Alabama".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.