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Silver buttons all down her back/ High hose, tippy toes/ She broke the needle and she can sew…
Written by: Rufus Thomas Recorded: Regent Sound Studios, London, Jan. 3-4 1964
Mick Jagger: vocals, handclaps Keith Richards: guitar Brian Jones: guitar, backingvocals, whistling Bill Wyman: bass Charlie Watts: drums
More about The Rolling Stones’ take on Walking the Dog
*By Marcelo Sonaglioni
A Memphis Classic With A Double Edge
Rufus Thomas belongs unmistakably to the musical landscape of Memphis. After starting as a singer at the Elks Club on Beale Street, he moved through Sam Phillips’s Sun operation before joining Stax, the label founded by Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton and originally known as Satellite. There, he recorded with his daughter Carla in 1960 and, three years later, delivered one of the company’s first major hits with Walking the Dog. Released in September 1963, the song reached number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December and remained on the chart for 14 weeks. Its mixture of R&B, humor, rhythm, and innuendo would soon take on a different personality when The Rolling Stones brought it to their debut album.
From Rufus Thomas to The Stones
Rufus Thomas’s original version plays almost like a miniature piece of musical theater. He whistles, calls for his dog, and incorporates references to children’s songs, while the opening uses the first 14 notes of Felix Mendelssohn’s Wedding March from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The result is deliberately playful, energetic, and rooted in the dance-oriented spirit of early Stax.
But Walking the Dog also belongs to the blues and rhythm ’n’ blues tradition in which an apparently innocent phrase can carry a much more suggestive meaning. The title works literally, yet the lyrics invite sexual interpretations and double entendres. When Mick Jagger sings, “If you don’t know how to do it / I’ll show you how to walk the dog,” the Stones hardly need to spell out the joke. Jagger’s delivery does that work for them.
When The Rolling Stones recorded the song, they did not simply attempt to reproduce Thomas’s arrangement. Instead, they reshaped it, stripping away much of its novelty character and turning it into something tougher, more guitar-driven, and unmistakably rock ’n’ roll.
Brian Jones Steps Into the Spotlight
The Stones’ recording contains several details that make it particularly distinctive. Brian Jones provides vocal harmonies alongside Jagger and whistles at the ends of the refrains, prompting Keith Richards to joke, “I always knew he had talent!” It is a revealing moment from a period when Jones still occupied a central position within the young band.
Richards later recalled that Brian was the leader of The Rolling Stones at the time, the musician who had helped bring the group together and whose greatest musical love was the harmonica. Jones also wanted to sing with Jagger, and Walking the Dog gave him one of those opportunities.
Instrumentally, Jones plays rhythm guitar on his green Gretsch Anniversary, while Richards handles lead guitar on his Harmony Meteor H70. His blues-rock playing gives the track much of its bite, with sharp riffs and a particularly strong solo that stands out on the album. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts provide the essential rhythmic foundation, while overdubbed hand claps add another layer of movement. Jagger, meanwhile, takes a more aggressive approach than Rufus Thomas, allowing the suggestive side of the lyrics to become part of the song’s attitude rather than merely a joke hidden beneath the surface.
The Stones Give The Song A New Identity
The real strength of the Stones’ version lies in the fact that they never try to imitate the Memphis sound too literally. They absorb it and then run it through their own musical personality.
The wedding-style opening fanfare disappears, replaced by a curling blues-rock guitar figure that immediately establishes a tougher atmosphere. The horns of the original are also gone, with slicing guitars taking their place. The rhythm becomes tighter, the hand claps more prominent, and Brian Jones’s whistling adds an almost mischievous quality to the arrangement.
Even Jagger’s spoken patter has a different effect here. Rufus Thomas performs that kind of material with the effortless authority of someone deeply connected to the tradition, whereas Jagger approaches it from the perspective of a young British rock singer fascinated by American blues and soul. That difference is precisely what makes the cover interesting.
Walking the Dog fits naturally into the albums The Rolling Stones in the UK and England’s Newest Hit Makers in the US. It is more than a cover of a recent American hit. The Stones transform a novelty soul-dance number into a leaner, harder piece of blues-rock without losing the humor or rhythm that made Thomas’s original so memorable.
The song also proves that the group already understood how effectively R&B material could work onstage. Walking the Dog becomes a popular live number in 1964, and The Rolling Stones perform it for the BBC on February 8 that year. For a band still establishing its identity, the track offers almost everything they need: an infectious groove, provocative lyrics, room for instrumental interplay, and plenty of attitude.
From Australia to the Stage
The story continues in 1965, when the Stones perform Walking the Dog on the Australian television program Big Beat ’65 on January 29. By this point, the musicians are using different guitars from those associated with the original recording period. Brian Jones plays his famous Vox “Teardrop”, while Keith Richards appears with a Gibson Les Paul Standard. The song also receives a new role in Australia. In 1965, Walking the Dog is released there as the B-side of Under the Boardwalk, which becomes The Rolling Stones’ first number 1 single in the country and stays at the top for three consecutive weeks.
It is an unusual journey for a song that begins in the Memphis R&B scene with Rufus Thomas. From Stax, it crosses the Atlantic and becomes part of the repertoire of a young British band before following them onto international stages. The Stones are far from the only artists to record it—versions also come from Aerosmith, The Troggs, Roger Daltrey, The Kingsmen, Johnny Rivers, and Mitch Ryder, among many more—but their interpretation remains particularly distinctive.
Walking the Dog captures one of the defining qualities of the early Rolling Stones: they look deeply toward American blues, soul, and R&B without simply reproducing what they hear. They take Rufus Thomas’s song, remove some of its more playful packaging, turn up the guitars, and reveal a darker, more muscular side underneath. The dog is still walking, of course—but with The Rolling Stones, it suddenly sounds like it has somewhere much more dangerous to go.
Leith Richards (1971): “Brian at that time is the leader of the band. He pulled us all together, he’s playing good guitar, but his love is the harmonica. On top of that, he’s got the pop star hang-up – he wants to sing, with Mick, like Walking the Dog.“
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