He’s fine with a ballad too…Īctually, there ain’t no ballads here, no way – a rare thing for a soul album of the era, which is one reason why the Walking The Dog record got worn out at parties. And he’s got a great voice: hoarse, wailing, deeply human – everybody needs an uncle like this at a family get-together. John Lee Hooker’s ‘Boom Boom’ gets extra boom-chitty-boom. He draws plenty from the R&B sounds of New Orleans: his version of ‘Ya Ya’ is the equal of Lee Dorsey’s, and his cut of Jesse Hill’s ‘Ooh-Poo-Pah-Doo’ outshines the original. He has personality by the bucketful, and hawks songs like a market trader shifting gen-u-wine Rolexes. Thomas knows how to stop stuff from getting dull. But no! Think of all those years spent as an entertainer. So this here (46-year-old teenager’s) debut album has exhortations to do ‘The Dog’, the ‘Mashed Potatoes’, the monkey (‘Can Your Monkey Do The Dog’) and the title tune. But once he’d broken through with Stax, he never went away, providing dance-craze soul tunes long after dance crazes were a retro thing.
He’d already had an on-off relationship with the R&B chart for a decade, providing Sun records with a hit – and a lawsuit claiming copyright infringement – with ‘Bear Cat’ in 1953, a reply to Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Hound Dog’. Born in 1917, he’d earned a decent living around Memphis as an MC, dancer, radio DJ and wisecrackin’ theatre act, and every one of those skills came in handy when he made his pop breakthrough with the album’s title track in 1963. Rufus Thomas was no pup when Walking The Dog was released.
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