When I was still in the single digit age bracket, I remember two of my teenaged sisters jiving around the kitchen to the sound of See You Later Alligator by Bill Haley & his Comets.  I can’t begin to count the number of times I have heard it since.  

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That was Bill’s song – right?  

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Wrong.  The writers were almost invisible to the adoring public of the hitmakers themselves in those days.  It was the stars who got the credit without question even though the names of songwriter and composer were shown in brackets after the song title.  I remember buying the Rolling Stones first album in 1964 and wondering why (Jagger, Richards) only appeared once out of the twelve tracks.  Who were these guys?  

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Troup, Dixon, Reed, McDaniels, Phelge, Moore, Berry, Holland, Dozier, Jarrett, Thomas?  It didn’t take me long to find out.

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The story behind the writing of See You Later Alligator is in itself a snapshot of American life in the 1950s.  

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In the 1970s, an untitled, obscure release on the Bearsville record label by a guy named Bobby Charles came out of nowhere to become an immediate favourite of mine.  I found out that his real name was Robert Guidry – the writer of Bill Haley’s everlasting hit record.  Then he disappeared again.

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There were no more Bobby Charles records for years and when they did come on CD it was via Stony Plain - a Canadian record label run by the music loving Holger Petersen who was also a Bobby Charles fan.  The albums were hard to find in a pre-digital world, but Bobby was clearly still active and making great recordings.  

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By early the early 2000s I’d already enjoyed some successes on Proper Records and decided to try and track down the reclusive Bobby Charles in Louisiana to see if he had anything new on tape that I could release on the label in a similar vein to the Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham album that we had recently put out.  

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Having found a PO Box address for his manager Jim Bateman, I sent him an airmail letter to see if there was anything cooking.  He replied by the same method saying that there was indeed a new album ready for release and Bobby would be pleased to meet to see if we could work out a deal.  I set up a trip to the USA for me and Paul Riley to do some other business (in search of a deal for Johnny Paycheck’s fabled Little Darlin’ recordings among other things – but that’s another story) and we met Bobby down in Louisiana for a shrimp dinner on our way to New Orleans from Nashville.

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It was a memorable evening and among other things, we heard the story of how he had written that enormous hit song.  He told us that he was in a diner with a pal from his school band and as they parted company he said, “See you later alligator” and walked to the door.  He heard a girl in the next booth reply, “In a while crocodile” and in a flash he rushed home and wrote the whole song that night.  He was still just a teenager.

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What happened after that with Chess Records and how the song got to Bill Haley can be found in our short biography of Bobby (URL) but what’s important here is that Bobby very generously agreed to Proper releasing the recordings as Last Train To Memphis.

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Growing up in Louisiana had led to Bobby being an ardent conservationist and he was very keen for us to do our best to get his song Clean Water (written in the 1980s) played on the radio.  So we added a bonus disc to the CD turning it into a two CD set that included most of the tracks from the two albums that Holger had previously released.

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Bobby died in 2010 and the CD went out of print when the deal expired.  Now, thanks to Charles Sonnier who is the executor of the Bobby Charles Trust, I have been able to reissue this album as to hopefully introduce a new generation to his music.  

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Bobby Charles didn’t make many albums but the body of recordings included on Last Train To Memphis fills the gap between his critically acclaimed 1971 Bearsville album up to 2003.  It is being released here by The Last Music Company on vinyl for the first time as a double LP comprising the fifteen tracks that Bobby originally wanted released as Last Train To Memphis plus a killer version of his classic The Jealous Kind.  The reissued compact disc edition also includes a bonus CD containing most of the tracks from the albums Wish You Were Here Right Now and Secrets Of The Heart.  

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Throughout all of these recording sessions Bobby was periodically joined by friends including Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Fats Domino, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Geoff Muldaur, Sonny Landreth and Maria Muldaur.

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