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Song of the Week #156
by Bobby Charles 

See You Later, Alligator
After 'while, crocodile
See You Later, Alligator
After 'while, crocodile
Can't you see you're in my way now?
Don't you know you cramp my style? 

Notwithstanding the confident assertion of a remarkable number of dictionaries, the phrase predates the song. "Alligator" is jazz rather than rock slang. In fact, it was one of the earliest jazz contributions to the vernacular. The term "alligator" was originally applied to jazz musicians back in the Twenties, initially to those who opened their mouths and did such extraordinary things that it seemed natural to compare the power of their jaws with members of the alligatoridae family - Louis Armstrong, for example. But "alligator" soon became a general term for any musician working in the jazz vein. Fats Waller and Andy Razaf, authors of "Ain't Misbehavin'" (discussed in my book A Song For The Season) wrote a number with Joe Davis called "Alligator Crawl". Razaf was a very vivid lyric writer: In "My Handy Man" and other risque songs, he took the double entendres and extended the imagery all the way to the end. But "Alligator Crawl" has nothing to say about gators or jaws or or swamps or lizard-like skin - because Razaf took it for granted that a song about alligators was a song about jumpin' musicians:

You're a lucky girl and lucky fellow
If you're among the happy crowd in the hall
When those music men start gettin' mellow
And they play that Alligator Crawl...

So an "alligator" was a musician. And in the Thirties and Forties "alligator" got abbreviated to "gator" and "gate". As in "Solid, gate!" - ie, "I say, fine work, musician chappie" - or (which is more germane to our musings today) "Later, gator!" - as in, "À la prochaine, mon ami!" "See you later, alligator" belongs to the same generation of hipster slang as "Man, dig that crazy frail" - or "You're in the groove, Jackson!", to cite Bob Hope's celebrated master class in how to speak American for a trio of Latin musicians in The Road To Rio (1947).

That said, the man who took a music world expression and made it a musical expression was Bobby Charles. He died suddenly last month at the not too ripe old age of 71, after years of ill health and decades of reclusiveness punctuated by the occasional "rediscovery". He re-emerged to perform "Down South In New Orleans" at The Band's famous farewell gig in 1976, but the number wasn't recorded and in the film of the concert, The Last Waltz, you only get a glimpse of him during Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released", for most of which he's blocked from view. And after the film's release he dropped from view even more totally. He had terrible bad luck: He lived in Maurice, Louisiana, but his house burned down, so he moved to the Gulf Coast, and his house got washed away. But all the cool cats dug him the most: Willie Nelson, Dr John, Ray Charles, Maria Muldaur, Neil Young. Yet, for all the aclaim of his colleagues for his later work, for the purposes of our weekly get-togethers in this space Bobby Charles is best known for three early rock'n'roll hits - "See You Later, Alligator", "(I Don't Know Why I Love You) But I Do" for Clarence "Frogman" Henry (it turned up again in Forrest Gump), and "Walking To New Orleans" for Fats Domino.

He was born Robert Charles Guidry in Abbeville, Louisiana in 1938. His dad was a truck driver for the gas company, but Bobby had other ideas, ever since the night a young kid barely in his teens retuned the radio dial from his parents' favorite Cajun station and stumbled upon Fats Domino. Bobby was hooked. Later, after he'd started writing music, he sent Fats a song called "Before I Grow Too Old". A few days later, Domino came to Lafayette, and Bobby went to see him. Fats said, "You gotta come to New Orleans to see me and hang out with me."

"I'd love to," replied Bobby, "but right now I'm really on my butt and got no money and no way to get over there... The only way I'd be able to get there would be to walk to New Orleans." The light bulb popped. "I gotta run," he told Domino, and wrote the song in the car on his way home to Abbeville. Fats made "Walking To New Orleans" a national hit in 1960.

Bobby Charles had good stories for all his big songs, and the best story of all was for his first and biggest hit. The year was 1952. Bobby was fronting a local group called the Cardinals, and he'd developed a habit of saying "See you later, alligator." Don't ask me why. Maybe, when you're a 14-year old in Abbeville, Louisiana, it's kinda cool to talk like a hep cat from a New York nightclub. At any rate, after one dance at a local eaterie, he headed for the door and, spotting his piano player in one of the booths, shot off his trademark, "See you later, alligator."

"There were two drunk couples in the booth in front," recalled Charles years later. "And it was one of those doors that closed real slow. I heard a girl say something about a crocodile. I walked back in and said, 'I don't mean to bother you, but I just told him, "See you later, alligator." What did you say?' She said, 'After a while, crocodile.' I said, 'Thank you,' and went home and wrote the song in 20 minutes. My daddy was screaming at me to turn out the lights, because he had to get up and go to work at 5 o'clock in the morning. I said, 'Give me five more minutes.'" Bobby Charles never played an instrument, so he heard the tune in his head and had to sing the words over and over and over until it stuck. You can see why, if you're getting up at dawn to go drive a truck, having a guy like that in the house might get kinda annoying.

Did it really happen the way he described it? I dunno. But in nearly 60 years nobody's ever tracked down the gal whose riposte fired Bobby Charles' musical imagination. Which is odd, considering that Abbeville isn't that big, and Bobby was not only born there but spent the final years of his life there. And even odder when you consider that he performed his song - then called "Hey, Alligator" - around town, both with the Cardinals and solo.

A couple of years go by, and Bobby's 16, and he's still singing his alligator song. And it comes to the attention of Charles Relich, who owns Dago's Record Shop in Crowley. Relich calls a guy he knows, Leonard Chess, one of the two brothers who own the Chess label, and he says, "You gotta hear this song." And he fixes up a date for Bobby to sing the alligator number down the phone to Leonard Chess. Next thing you know, Chess has booked a studio session for young Bobby in New Orleans, and wants to fly him up to Chicago to sign a contract. Phil Chess, Leonard's brother, picked him up at the airport, and was stunned to discover their new prodigy was white. "You can't be Bobby Charles," he said. "Leonard's gonna shit." Chess was an all-black label - Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters. But the record was out, it was an r'n'b hit, and they were stuck with the white kid. If you listen to the original "Later, Alligator", you can sort of hear why the Chess brothers might have got confused. It's not that Bobby Charles' singing is especially black, but the song is in the form of a 12-bar blues, complete with lyric repetitions, and the backing sounds like a straightforward r'n'b record:

Well, I saw my baby walkin'
With another man today
Well, I saw my baby walkin'
With another man today
When I asked her what's the matter
This is what I heard her say

See You Later, Alligator
After 'while, crocodile
See You Later, Alligator
After 'while, crocodile
Can't you see you're in my way now?
Don't you know you cramp my style?

It's a nifty idea for a song. Especially a song from Louisiana, where alligator isn't just some zoot-suit vernacular, but your next-door neighbor. His snout's a little different from a croc, but so what? A monkey's not the same as a chimp, but it didn't stop the two of them being yoked together to great success in "The Aba Daba Honeymoon", a big hit before the First World War, and to which "Later Alligator" is a kind of lizardy sequel, an Aba Daba bust-up:

As things transpired, being mistaken for black was, financially, the best thing that ever happened to Bobby Charles. His single on Chess got to Number 14 on the rhythm'n'blues chart, and so naturally, as was their wont with so called "race records" in those days, the major record companies in New York started rummaging through their pasty-faced rosters to find someone to do the white cover version of the black guy's alligator song. And that's where Bobby Charles got real lucky. His song fell into the hands of Decca Records and Bill Haley and the Comets, whose previous record was not so much a hit but a phenomenon: "Rock Around The Clock". It was Number One for two months in the summer of 1955 and represented such a decisive break with what had gone before that for pop musicologists it remains to this day the Year Zero of the rock era: the song that officially marks the fall of the ancien régime and the dawn of the rock'n'roll revolution. As it happens, its composer, Jimmy DeKnight, originally wrote it as a foxtrot, and, as Tim Rice likes to point out, its lyricist Max Freedman was born in the 19th century. So, if not exactly ancien régime, he was certainly pretty ancien: When Freedman was a rebellious teen, the big hits were Rudyard Kipling's "Road To Mandalay" and "When A Fellow's On The Level With A Girl That's On The Square". In the wake of "Rock Around The Clock", Decca had released "Rock-A-Beatin' Boogie" and a couple of other Haley trifles that were not exactly comet-like when it came to rocketing up the charts. But where to find a real follow-up to Bill's blockbuster? The answer turned out to be a goofy novelty song by a Louisiana teenager half-a-century younger than the author of "Rock Around The Clock".

Bill Haley gets short shrift these days (see Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello's observations in this spot three weeks ago), but when he went into the Decca studio in New York on December 12th 1955 he made several improvements to Bobby Charles' song. You're never quite sure with the original whether Charles meant it to be real bluesy - ie, whether we're meant to take the tale of love and rejection and regret at least semi-seriously. Haley doesn't waste time with that at all: He might as well be reading out his tax return for all the emotional investment he puts into the verses; they're there because you need an interlude between the singalong choruses, that's all. Meanwhile, he picks up the pace of the Charles version, simplifies the accompaniment into a crisp rock'n'roll backing, adds that signature sax fill, gets his lead guitarist Franny Beecher to announce the title of the song in an almost child-like voice, and for the end virtually reprises the close of "Shake, Rattle'n'Roll". Before he became a rock sensation, Haley had been an accomplished hillbilly swinger, and he knew how to bounce off a lyric. He perks up "See You Later" all the way to the wind-up:

See You Later, Alligator
After a while, crocodile
See You Later, Alligator
So long!
That's all!
Goodbye! 

The critics were unimpressed: "Rock'n'roll rhythm in full cry, primitive to the point of idiocy," pronounced Time magazine. "The title is warmed-over jive talk; the response: 'After a while, crocodile.'" But that bit of "warmed-over jive talk" went mainstream on an industrial scale. Haley and the Comets tore up the screen with it in the hit film Rock Around The Clock. In America, grade-schoolers loved it and eagerly sang along. In Continental Europe, non-anglophones latched onto it. In Britain, Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret was heard to use the expression. Chess Records liked it, too. Hitherto, their music publishing subsidiary had been pretty much an afterthought to their record sales. But the mechanical royalties from Decca's "See You Later" earned the brothers more money than any of their own records.

As for Bobby Charles, he was one of those guys who wound up living all the cliches of the music business, including the one where the formerly naive young popster decides he's being ripped off by the music biz sharks. He parted company with Chess, formed his own publishing company with a friend, parted company with the friend, took up with the legendary and notorious Albert Goldman, parted company with Goldman. When a guy writes big hits but doesn't wind up with big money, it's usually because of him. After all, he's supposed to look out for him; the record company's looking out for the record company. Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan and all kinds of other folks figured that much out. But Bobby Charles seemed to take a perverse pride in not doing so. When Martin Scorsese was filming The Last Waltz, he wanted Charles to sing "Later Alligator" and have The Band and Dylan and all the other bigshots play along - an act of hommage from the biggest stars of the day to a protean rock'n'roll landmark. But the singer figured he'd like to do a new song that nobody knew. "Martin Scorsese dropped his jaw," remembered Charles. "He couldn't believe I was saying no to him... 'Who is this guy?' he asked. 'He's somebody that doesn't want to be a star.' I said, `I'm sorry, it's just the way I am.'"

And so he was. And he knew himself well enough not to let it chew him up. In 1956, an 18-year old boy from Abbeville, Louisiana had a monster worldwide hit, and in the next half-century never matched its success ever again, and never seemed bothered that he hadn't. In 2003, 50 years after he'd first sung the song, he re-recorded it with a fat horn sound and Sonny Landreth on slide guitar, on yet another one of those obscure Bobby Charles albums beloved by insiders but unknown to the public. In 2007, he was supposed to star at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival but bailed at the last minute. By then, after the fires and floods, he was back living in the same town he'd started out in - Abbeville, Louisiana. He kept himself to himself, dining alone most days at a seafood joint where the waitress knew him well enough to start mixing his martini as his car was pulling into the parking lot.

See You Later, Alligator
So long!
That's all!
Goodbye!

See you later.