Stars Fell on Alabama

Meteors streaking across Alabama were the inspiration for a jazz standard and a state motto. The song “Stars Fell on Alabama” was a hit in 1934, the same year a book by the same name was published. Astronomers estimate that a meteor storm on Nov. 12-13, 1833, bombarded Earth’s atmosphere with more than 30,000 meteors an hour blazing over Alabama and much of the rest of the country.  The memories still burn. Two centuries later, the phrase “Stars fell on Alabama” appeared on Alabama license plates from 2002 to 2009. The 1833 storm was an unusually active display of Leonid meteors, specks of debris from the comet Tempel-Tuttle, often as small as grains of sand, that briefly streak across the sky as they burn up in the atmosphere. “The sky was literally filled with fireworks, and people thought it was the end of the world. That was the night stars fell on Alabama and most of North America,” said Bill Cooke, an astronomer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center near Huntsville. “The only people who weren’t scared were the American Indians. They interpreted meteors as a sign of good luck.” The 1833 event terrified people across America, says an article in “The Alabama Guide.” The Huntsville Democrat newspaper, as cited in the guide, reported on “this most awful and sublime appearance” and wrote, “For several hours, thousands and even millions of these meteors appeared in every direction to be in constant motion.” Some people believed Judgment Day was at hand, said an article that ran in Alabama Heritage magazine in 2000. The article quoted a newspaper from a town in Georgia that said many profane people “were frightened to their knees,” that dust-covered Bibles were opened and that dice and cards were thrown to the flames .About a century later, the event inspired the title of “Stars Fell on Alabama,” a book by New York native Carl Carmer. He taught English at the University of Alabama in the 1920s and wrote a book of essays, many of them relating stories people told him as he traveled the state.  The book, published in 1934, said some black women told Carmer their fathers knew slaves whose memories were seared by the “awful event.” “Many an Alabamian to this day reckons dates from ‘the year the stars fell,'” Carmer wrote. Soon after the book came out, Mitchell Parish wrote the words and Frank Perkins the music of the song “Stars Fell on Alabama,” a hit after the Guy Lombardo Orchestra recorded it the same year.  The song tells of “a situation so heavenly,” with a couple kissing in a field of white, and says several times that “stars fell on Alabama last night.” Alabama has another connection to falling stars, which came years after the hit song. Ann Hodges in 1954 had the bruise left on her upper thigh after she was struck by a meteorite in Sylacauga, Ala. (Alabama Museum of Natural History). On Nov. 30, 1954, an eight-and-a-half pound rock burned through the skies over the state and fell on 34-year-old Ann Elizabeth Hodges, who was napping on her couch at her Sylacauga home. It had poked a hole clean through Hodges’ roof, bounced off her radio, and nailed her right in the thigh, creating a pineapple-sized welt. Hodges had, unwittingly, just become the first known person in modern history to be struck by a rock falling from space.  John C. Hall, director of the Black Belt Museum at the University of West Alabama, thinks the phrase “Stars Fell on Alabama” resonates today because of the song, not the book or the meteor storm.  “The song was so popular, and was a standard from every Alabama band performance from 1934 (on), that I think that is what has kept the phrase before the public.” Here are some other well-known renditions: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong Billie Holiday