The 1960s File Feature
Walking The Dog
Walking The Dog — Rufus Thomas and Memphis Soul's Joyful Command Memphis in 1963 and the Sound of Stax In the fall of 1963, a particular sound was radiating …
01 The Story
Walking The Dog — Rufus Thomas and Memphis Soul's Joyful Command
Memphis in 1963 and the Sound of Stax
In the fall of 1963, a particular sound was radiating outward from a former movie theater on McLemore Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee. Stax Records had been building something extraordinary for several years, a house style that combined the raw emotional directness of Southern soul with tight, rhythmically sophisticated arrangements delivered by some of the finest session musicians working in America. The label had already broken through nationally with artists like Carla Thomas, and it was about to introduce her father to a much larger audience. Rufus Thomas, a Memphis radio personality, comedian, and performer with decades of stage experience behind him, recorded Walking The Dog in 1963 and unleashed one of the most irresistibly fun tracks of the decade.
Thomas was not a young discovery in 1963. Born in 1917, he had been performing in Memphis since the late 1930s, working as an emcee on the chitlin circuit, hosting the famous amateur nights at the Palace Theater on Beale Street, and later becoming a DJ on WDIA, one of the first radio stations in America to target a Black audience with Black programming and Black air talent. He had decades of crowd-reading experience and understood exactly what made people move. Walking The Dog deploys all of that knowledge.
The Stax Sound in Action
The recording is a masterclass in rhythmic economy. The groove locks in immediately and does not release for the duration of the track, driven by the tight interplay of drums, bass, and guitar that characterized the best Stax productions of the period. Rufus Thomas wrote the song himself, building it on a simple rhythmic phrase that functions simultaneously as a description of a dance move and as pure sonic pleasure independent of any literal meaning. The horns punctuate without overwhelming, leaving space for Thomas's voice to dominate as it should.
The Stax house band, which would later be formalized as Booker T. and the MGs alongside the Mar-Keys horn section, provided the instrumental foundation that made the label's recordings so distinctive. Their sound was rawer and more rhythmically direct than the Motown productions coming out of Detroit at the same time, and that rawness gave tracks like Walking The Dog a physical immediacy that recordings with more polished arrangements sometimes lacked. You feel this song before you understand it.
A Fourteen-Week Climb to Number 10
Walking The Dog debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 80 on October 5, 1963, and began a methodical upward journey that would take it all the way to the top ten. By late October, it had cracked the top 50; by early November, it was approaching the top 30. The peak came on December 7, 1963, when the track reached number 10 on the Hot 100, making it a genuine national crossover hit at a time when that crossover for Black artists on the national pop chart required not just commercial appeal but extraordinary creative force.
Fourteen weeks on the chart for a track built on such a simple premise demonstrates the song's genuine power over listeners. By the date of its chart peak, it had been heard enough times to wear out its welcome in theory, but audiences kept requesting it. The dance it described, or inspired, gave it a physical life beyond radio listening.
Dance Crazes and Their Chart Allies
The early 1960s was a period unusually rich in dance songs and the crazes they generated. From the Twist through a succession of novelty dances, American popular music in this period was deeply invested in the connection between song and movement. Walking The Dog participates in this tradition with particular effectiveness because it makes the instruction part of the song's own content. Thomas describes the dance move within the lyric, creating a self-contained teaching mechanism that radio could broadcast without any visual component.
The Rolling Stones recorded a version of the song for their debut album, released in 1964, a fact that speaks volumes about the track's reach beyond the Black musical community and into the British Invasion's source material. The Stones, famously devoted to American rhythm and blues, recognized in Thomas's track something essential and borrowed it gladly.
Thomas's Legacy and Stax's Moment
Rufus Thomas would go on to score additional novelty hits through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, including Do The Funky Chicken, maintaining a chart presence across three different decades. But Walking The Dog remains his signature, the track that introduced him to a national audience and demonstrated that genuine joy in performance is itself a marketable quality. Thomas understood entertainment as a craft, something he had honed over decades in front of demanding live audiences, and that understanding is entirely audible in this recording.
Stax Records would go on to become one of the most important labels in American music history, producing landmark recordings by Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Isaac Hayes, and many others. Walking The Dog belongs to the label's early period, when its sound was still crystallizing and each successful record helped establish what Stax could be. Thomas contributed meaningfully to that formation.
Put this on at any party and watch what happens to the room. The song is sixty-plus years old and it still works exactly as intended.
"Walking The Dog" — Rufus Thomas's singular moment on the 1960s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Walking The Dog — Meaning, Joy, and the Blues Tradition Behind Rufus Thomas's Classic
The Dance as the Song's True Subject
On its most immediate level, Walking The Dog is an instruction manual delivered by someone who genuinely enjoys giving it. The song describes a dance move with the specificity of someone who has spent years watching people move on crowded dance floors and knows exactly what the body needs to let go. Rufus Thomas was not theorizing about dance; he was communicating it directly, with the authority of a performer who had been entertaining live audiences for three decades before the record was ever cut.
The dance itself, a rolling hip movement that the song describes and demonstrates through its own rhythm, makes the song and the body experience inseparable. You cannot really listen to this track without some involuntary physical response. That quality, the music's capacity to compel movement without asking permission, is one of the oldest functions of African American musical expression and one of its most powerful.
The Blues Underneath the Fun
Beneath the track's cheerful surface runs a deep current of blues tradition. The call-and-response structure, the repetition of the central phrase, the way Thomas's vocal dances around and between the rhythmic grid rather than sitting squarely on top of it, all of these elements trace back through decades of blues and gospel practice to fundamentals of Black American musical expression. The song is not simply a novelty tune; it is novelty built on a firm stylistic foundation.
Rufus Thomas absorbed this tradition through direct experience. He performed on Beale Street during an era when many of the originators of the blues were still active, and he understood the music from the inside. When he recorded in Memphis in 1963, that accumulated experience shaped everything from his phrasing to his sense of when to let the groove breathe and when to push against it.
Race, Radio, and Crossover in 1963
The cultural context of Walking The Dog's 1963 chart run includes a complex set of racial dynamics. The American pop chart in this period was still largely segregated in practice, with Black artists frequently charting on the R&B charts without crossing over to the pop Hot 100. Reaching number 10 on the national pop chart in late 1963 was a genuine achievement that required the song to transcend the structural disadvantages Black artists faced in mainstream commercial music distribution and radio programming.
The fact that the song was being covered by British artists like the Rolling Stones within months of its release indicates how rapidly and widely its influence spread once it was available. British musicians of the early 1960s were consuming American rhythm and blues with an enthusiasm that sometimes outpaced their American contemporaries' willingness to promote it. Their enthusiasm for Thomas's track was a form of recognition that the American market was still learning to provide consistently.
Joy as a Serious Artistic Choice
In the America of 1963, a year that included the March on Washington, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, a Black performer choosing to make music about pure, uncomplicated joy was making a statement, even if that statement was implicit rather than declared. The freedom to be funny, to celebrate the body's pleasure in movement, to demand that an audience simply have a good time is itself a form of cultural assertion.
Thomas understood this dimension of his work intuitively. His stage persona, built on decades of experience as an emcee, comedian, and entertainer, was fundamentally about giving audiences permission to enjoy themselves fully, without qualification or apology. Walking The Dog extends that permission to a national recording audience.
Decades of Durability
The song's presence in the catalogs of the Rolling Stones and numerous other artists across multiple genres is the most concrete evidence of its cultural durability. Songs that get covered do not simply generate cover versions; they generate conversations, interpretations, and the kind of creative engagement that is the highest form of musical respect. The approximately 1.6 million YouTube views that Thomas's original recording has accumulated represent ongoing listener interest that has stretched well beyond the original chart moment. People still seek out the original because there is something in Thomas's particular delivery that the covers cannot quite replicate: the sound of someone who has been waiting his whole career for exactly this moment, and knows exactly what to do with it.
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