Fuqua first brought home a Bob Dylan bootleg from a family trip to London containing a rough outtake called "Rock Me, Mama", passing it to Secor. Not "so much a song as a sketch," Secor would later say, "crudely recorded featuring most prominently a stomping boot, the candy-coated chorus and a mumbled verse that was hard to make out". But the tune kept going through his mind. A few months later, while attending Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and "feeling homesick for the South," he added verses about "hitchhiking his way home full of romantic notions put in his head by the Beat poets and, most of all, Dylan."