Language of the Blues: DOG

This is the latest installment in our weekly series, The Language of the Blues, in which author and rocker Debra Devi explores the meaning of a word or phrase from a blues song. Come back every week for the latest! Devi’s award-winning book, The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to ZuZu, includes a foreword by Dr. John  and is blurbed by Bonnie Raitt and Joe Bonamassa. Get your signed copy at Bluescentric.com!

In Southern Nigeria, to call someone a dog is an insult that implies that the person is hopelessly oversexed. By the 1920s and 1930s in the southern United States, “dog finger” was slang for the middle finger and a “salty dog” was a penis that had recently engaged in intercourse.

There are numerous blues songs in which a person who has been utterly humiliated by a powerful attraction to an unfaithful lover describes him- or herself as a dog, and may even declare, “I won’t be dogged around no more.” In “Doggin Me Around Blues,” for example, Jenny Pope sang:

I been your dog every since I entered your door
I’m gonna leave this town
I won’t be dogged around no more

There’s also a long tradition of blues and R&B singers describing the unfaithful lover as a dog. Sometimes a dog is the messenger, as well as the symbol, of a partner’s infidelity, as in the Lightnin’ Hopkins tune “Hear My Black Dog Bark.”

I go home in the morning my breakfast ain’t never done
Every time I get to my house that’s about the time
My little girl she’s on the run

When I go home
I can hear my black dog bark
You know it hurt me so bad
It about to break my heart

Songs:
“Doggin Me Around Blues”- Jenny Pope
“Hear My Black Dog Bark”- Lightnin’ Hopkins (Sam Hopkins)
“Stop Doggin’ Me Around” – Johnnie Taylor

Video:
Johnnie Taylor – “Stop Doggin’ Me Around”