The year 1906 was a highly eventul one for Ives: he began courting his future wife, his insurance company came under state government investigation (with the eventual result that he left to found his own agency), and he made some of his most decisive breaks with musical tradition as he began a number of his finest pieces. In the midst of it all Ives found time to stop to write two "joke" scherzos (the present work and Over the Pavements.

At least back to his Yale University days Ives amused his friends by writing musical takeoffs on campus events, such as fraternity pledge night (Calcium Light Night), an address by the University president (A Lecture), or the invention of the forward pass in football (The Yale-Princeton Football Game). He continued this practice when he started in business in New York and lived in an apartment (that its denizens called "Poverty Flat") with other young businessmen.

All the Way Around and Back is of a piece with these takeoffs. It is a short piece that depicts an event graphically, in ways not bounded by musical rules. It has a moment of tension, then an outburst of vigorous energy, and then a disappointed-sounding deflation. Ives describes it in a subtitle: "Foul ball—and the base runner on 3rd has to go all the way back to 1st."

Ives composed the piece for a chamber group of clarinet, bugle, violin, bells, and piano.

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