“Walking to New Orleans" is a 1960 song by Bobby Charles, written for and recorded by Fats Domino.
When he was around 13, Robert Charles Guidry began singing with a band around his hometown of Abbeville, La., deep in the Cajun swamps. After experiencing a Fats Domino show Charles found himself with a new ambition: to write a song for Fats.
One night as he left a gig, Charles said to his friends, "See ya later, alligator," and one of them yelled back, "In a while, crocodile." Guidry stopped in his tracks. "What did you say?" he asked. The friend repeated it. At that moment, as would happen countless times in the future, the song "See You Later, Alligator" came to him, fully formed.
Fats didn't want the song and told the young man he didn't want to sing about alligators. Somehow, though, the kid wound up singing the song over the phone to Leonard Chess, whose Chess Records in Chicago was the hottest blues label. They recorded him and put the song out, changing Guidry's name to Bobby Charles. Almost immediately, Bill Haley grabbed it for himself. Haley's record was one of the best sellers of 1956, and both Chess and Charles made some decent money from it.
He also got to realize a dream. One evening, Fats Domino played Abbeville, and Fats invited Charles to a show in New Orleans. The young singer said he had no way to get there. "Well," the fat man said, "you'd better start walking." Afterwards, the thought remained on Charles's mind, and he said he wrote the song for Domino in some 15 minutes.
After he got to New Orleans to accept Domino's invitation for a show, Charles sang "Walking to New Orleans" for Domino. Fats was enthusiastic about the number and made a few modifications to it. The producer added orchestration and the use of classical strings, which was unusual for the time. The record became a hit, released on Imperial Records, reaching #6 on the pop chart and #2 on the R & B chart.
Bobby Charles continued writing and selling songs and recorded for some local Louisiana labels and eventually found himself in upstate New York. He saw the name Woodstock on a map. He'd never even heard of the famous festival, but the name appealed to him. Arriving in town, he asked a real-estate agent about a place to rent and wound up in a house shared with two other musicians. They introduced him to Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and others. The next thing he knew, Charles was back in the studio with members of The Band, Dr. John and an assortment of other Woodstock musicians.
Charles focused on songwriting, but he wasn't comfortable in Woodstock and in the end, he went back to Abbeville, where he disappeared from public view for an entire decade. He kept writing songs and he entertained visitors who came to Abbeville to meet him — people like Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Willie Nelson. His record label, Rice 'N' Gravy, put out several homemade albums, which mixed his old and new songs.
At 70, Bobby Charles was diagnosed with cancer and he died in January 2010, unknown to most of the world he'd enriched with his songs.
Various Sources