Australian singles chart:
The Wanderer entered the Kent charts on 27 January 1962 and peaked at #1. It was #21 on the Top 100 of 1962.
Album:
The song is on Dion’s 1961 album Runaround Sue.
Songwriter:
Ernie Maresca
Producer:
Gene Schwartz
Record label of Australian release:
Top Rank
Songfacts:
In this song, Dion is warning Flo, Jane and Mary to stay clear of The Wanderer. Dion told Rolling Stone magazine in 1976: “You say to a chick, ‘Stay away from that guy. And she would say, ‘What guy?’ Chicks loved a rebel.”
Dion recalled in Mojo magazine March 2008: “I was trying to do what they (his record label) wanted me to do. It was the times, you know? You could say The Wanderer is my little white version of I’m A Man. I saw Bo Diddley do I’m A Man and he had this big belt buckle and I thought, I gotta get a song like that, so I did The Wanderer. But if you listen to the lyric, it’s really a sad song, and it actually turns in on itself, because it says ‘I roam from town to town/I go through life without a care/I wave my two fists of iron/but I’m goin’ nowhere.’ You’ve got a thin veneer of what a man is. The guy’s goin’ to hell, but he’s having a lot of fun doin’ it.”
Read more: www.songfacts.com/facts/dion/the-wanderer
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