Mystery of the “Gotta Quit Kickin’ My Dawg Aroun'” song

I had seen the piece of sheet music in a back room of the auction house, slightly ajar in its frame, the masking tape holding it in place having lost its glue. The front cover was a dull yellow, the black lettering oversized, and the mug of a hound dog named Jim stared haplessly out at me.

Jim looked miserable, but not enough for me to actually want that piece of music. After acquiring it as part of a lot, though, I decided to check out the piece. This particular auction house had been selling sheet music like crazy for the past month or so, heavy stacks of it apparently from the collection of someone who had just bought the stuff to hoard.

They probably never looked at it, I overheard one auction-goer say to another. And she was probably right; there was just too much of it for anyone to know what they had.

At an earlier auction, I had bought sheet music for a song by Thomas A. Dorsey from another buyer because I didn’t want the entire lot. A gospel song called “In the Scheme of Things,” it was written by Dorsey to his second wife in 1958.

The song with the yellow cover was titled “They Gotta Quit Kickin’ My Dawg Aroun’,” and someone liked the cover so much that they had framed it with cardboard (a no-no). Attached to the cardboard on the back was a 1983 notarized document authenticating the copyright date as 1912, publisher M. Witmark & Sons, and artists Webb M. Oungst (words) and Cy Perkins (music). The sheet also contained lyrics for four other songs, including a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem “Who Knows?” from 1909.

The hound dog song tells the story of three men whose dog is attacked by the good ole boys every time they take him into town. Tired of them messing with their dog, they beat up the men and Jim tears them to pieces.

The refrain:

“Every time I go to town

The boys keep a-kickin’ my dog around

Makes no difference if he is a hound

You got to quit kicking my dog around”

A folk tune, the song seems to have always been pretty popular. I found several solo singers and groups belting it out on YouTube. Someone even arranged the lyrics for a ukulele.

Bob Dylan and The Band included it in their Basement Tapes, a group of 100 songs that they recorded in 1967 in the basement of a house where they were living in West Saugerties, NY. The songs included folk music, blues, ballads and original tunes.

It’s not clear who wrote the song, when it was written and where it was written. It  had several titles ascribed to it: “The Hound Dawg Song” and “The Missouri Dawg Song.”

Googling, I first found a site indicating that it was written by James Bland, an African American songwriter/performer who was much-heralded in the late 1900s for his minstrel tunes. I had bought a book of minstrel tunes at auction last year that included several of his songs.

But as I dug deeper, I found that the origin of the song was not so simple. It was likely written after the Civil War around the 1880s. The earliest recorded version was said to have been done by Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers in 1928 (don’t you love that name).

Bland and other songwriters may have done their own arrangements of the tune, but I could not find his arrangement on the web. He was a  prolific writer, penning about 700 tunes and performing his works with minstrel troupes in the United States and Europe.

Some of his songs were attributed to other songwriters such as his contemporary Stephen Foster. Bland was said to have sold some of his tunes to other minstrel performers who published them as their own – apparently a common practice at the time.

Bland is known for such songs as “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny (1878)” and “Oh Dem Golden Slippers (1879).” He remained in Europe for 20 years during the late 19th century, and by the time he returned to this country, minstrelsy had given way to vaudeville and he was out of fashion. He died penniless in Philadelphia in 1911.

The hound-dog song was said to have been common in comedy shows, and Bland was said to have used it in his performances. It was picked up in 1912 as the campaign song of Missouri Democratic Sen. James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark, who was running for president against Woodrow Wilson.

Around the same time, the Missouri National Guard Second Infantry adopted it as one of its favorites.

The song in the sheet music at auction was written as a collaboration between Oungst and Perkins, who was actually Carrie Stark, wife of a music producer named William Stark. She had written some songs under her own name, according to one account, but decided to assume a male pseudonym on this one because she thought it would sell better.

Witmark bought the rights to the song for $10,000, but questions about its authorship sparked lawsuits. Clark was said to have collaborated on hers in 1911 or 1912, but others balked at her claiming original authorship.

Here are some recorded versions of the song:

The Skillet Lickers

Bob Dylan and his lyrics

Russ Brown and the Cadets singing the Oungst and Perkins composition:

Byron G. Harlan and the American Quartet in 1912.