Songfacts®:

• A songwriter named Jeff Cook wrote the lyric to this one, which is about a travelin' man who has a fling with a sweet young thing named Alexis. Of course, it couldn't last because he had to be moving on, this time to Atlanta, then maybe on to New Orleans.
  
  Cook made up the story - he had never been to Atlanta or New Orleans. "The lyrics were all just imagination," he told Greg Prato in Facts on Tracks: Stories Behind 100 Rock Classics. "But what's very interesting is that whole song came true in my life. Ten years later, I ended up moving to Atlanta, meeting a woman younger than myself, marrying her, and having a daughter - so we named her Alexis. And her whole family was from New Orleans. So the song actually came true!"
• James Gang guitarist Tommy Bolin, who replaced Joe Walsh in August 1973, wrote the music for this song and sang lead. He and Jeff Cook had been bandmates in a group called Energy.