it WAS a dog

I first heard this song by the electric-folk band Steeleye Span in 1977 or so.



Hear that vocal sound at 2.06 that sets the beat for speeding up the tempo of the instrumental section at the end of the song? Presumably it's a person setting the beat, but it sounds a lot like a dog, doesn't it?

As I recall, alone among my Steeleye-listening friends, I maintained that it was a dog. The rest thought it just sounded like one. We listened to it over and over, but never solved the mystery. Remember that this was a much-played worn LP over the kind of stereo system that college students could afford in the 1970s, not the crisp digital rendition of today.

And now, all these years later, I have the answer to this long-nagging mystery. It WAS a dog. The producer had brought his Yorkshire terrier to the studio that day, and the dog barked at just the right moment, so they left it in.

How do I know this? From reading All Around My Hat: The Steeleye Span Story by John Van der Kiste (Fonthill Media, 2019). And how did I find out about this book? From watching the live Q&A with the band over Zoom that came with the ticket I bought from their record label for a video of a concert. A couple newer members held it up and said they'd learned a lot from it. It has some terrible reviews on Amazon, but I thought it reasonably well-written and pretty informative, so I recommend it to Steeleye fans.

As for the concert, nothing in the publicity said when it was from, but the presence of a live audience suggested it was a bit back, and from some clues in the between-songs chatter I was able to research that it was from their spring 2019 UK tour. Nevertheless it was a terrific concert. The now-seven-member band's sound was big and powerful without being heavy or over-miked, as it had been the only previous time I'd heard this line-up, and they played with tremendous energy. The instrumental riffs in the older songs were preserved from the originals and even expanded. The big songs - "Tam Lin", "King Henry", and the best of the all-around good songs from their (then) new album, Est'd 1969, "Harvest" - were particularly sizzling. New guitarist Andrew Sinclair has taken over most of Bob Johnson's old vocals and his guitar solos, all of which he does very well, while older guitarist Julian Littman still sings "King Henry", which is always the one he was best at, and has taken over Maddy Prior's lead singing role on "Little Sir Hugh". Maddy still does most of the singing, of course, and is still the class lady of the biz.