Songfacts®:

• Ten years before Glenn Miller boarded the "Chattanooga Choo Choo", the Scottsboro Boys boarded the same train traveling from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee, where they might just have met a 4-year-old Chuck Berry if they hadn't been arrested at Paint Rock for rape, taken to Scottsboro, tried convicted, and sentenced to death. Apart from the youngest of them, who was 12 years old at the time.
  
  The story of the nine young Black men known as the Scottsboro Boys is one of the most shameful in what was admittedly a difficult era for most Americans; 1931 was the height of the Great Depression. The Scottsboro Boys were hoboing when they got into a fight with some white hoboes and were accused of rape by two low-class white women. The case of the Scottsboro Boys dragged on for years before the truth came out.
• The uptempo "Commencing In Chattanooga" is the second song in The Scottsboro Boys; as the rest of the musical, it has music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 2