“A doggie is nothing if he don’t have a bone…”
Novelty songs come up every once in a while as a reminder that a hit song sometimes has no rhyme (literally) or reason. In 2000, that was never more apparently true than when the Baha Men released their smash hit “Who Let the Dogs Out.”
The song was everywhere for a few months, and it ended up reaching Number 2 in the UK, number one in Australia and NZ, the top 10 for several countries and Europe and number 40 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart and #6 on the Dance chart. The song would go on to win a Grammy in 2001 for Best Dance Recording, and the Baha Men would win the Billboard Music Awards for World Music Artist of the Year and World Music Album of the Year; and a Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award for Favorite Song. They beat “Bounce with Me” by Lil’ Bow Wow, “Bye Bye Bye” by NSYNC, and “Oops… I Did It Again” by Britney Spears. In 2002, they won another Kids’ Choice Award for Favorite Band. In case you were wondering who the other nominees were that year, we’ve got:
- Creed
- Smash Mouth
- Sugar Ray
I think this is the point where I (Emilie) have to share that I wrote album reviews for my Catholic elementary/middle school’s “newspaper” and one time I wrote three reviews for an issue. They were for new albums released by Creed, Smash Mouth, and Lil’ Romeo. Apart from winning a poetry content in fifth grade, that’s the first time I was ever “published.” It could only go uphill from there.
So the Baha Men, or what they were originally called, High Voltage, are a Bahamian band that has been together in some sort of iteration since 1977. They perform a genre of music known as Junkanoo, which is a type of music that’s performed during street parades in the English-speaking Caribbean.
The band was fairly popular because of these festival parades and also performed at various clubs all over the Bahamas. In the early ’90s, an Atlantic Records A&R guy by the name of Steve Greenberg gets one of the Baha Men’s tapes and decides to sign the band to an Atlantic subsidiary called Big Beat and that’s when they change their name from High Voltage to the Baha Men.
Steve Greenberg had an impressive career in the record industry. In addition to discovering the Baha Men, he is also responsible for discovering Hanson, the Jonas Brothers, and Joss Stone. He was one of the producers on “MMMBop.”
After stints at Atlantic, Mercury and Polygram Records (and the Baha Men followed him to a few of these labels), Greenberg decides to start his own label, S-Curve Records, specifically to sign the Baha Men, who at this point had been dropped by Polygram for lackluster sales of their first few albums in the early to mid ’90s. He asked the Baha Men to record a cover of this song called “Who Let the Dogs Out.” They were hesitant because it was a hit for Trinidadian singer Anslem Douglas in the late ’90s. At the time, almost no one in the US had heard this song.
The evolution of this song’s chorus, and who actually wrote it and deserves royalties, is fascinating. In terms of who performed the original song, there are people in Florida, New York, Canada, Trinidad, London, and many other places who claim to have written this song. Basically, there are several versions of this song that were recorded with some variation of the chorus throughout the ‘90s, and it’s very hard to trace who the originator is.
There were two young guys in Jacksonville, Florida in the early ’90s who recorded a song that had a variation of the “Who Let the Dogs Out, who who who who” chorus. Then in 1994 there was a dance/techno group called 20 Fingers based in New York City, and they release a track featuring a singer name Gillette, called “You’re a Dog.” There’s a part where she says “Who let them dogs loose? Who who who who.” This chorus and the song were written as female response to the slut-shaming they dealt with from guys (aka the dogs) in clubs and out and about.
A year later, two radio DJs in Buffalo, Leroy Williams and Patrick Stephenson, had coined a tagline they regularly used during their radio show “Who Let the Dogs Out, woof woof woof woof.” The tagline was coined around 1995ish.
Around two years later, a song called “Doggie” (sometimes spelled as “Dogie”) was released by a Trinidadian singer named Anslem Douglas and his producer Ossie Gurley that has the same exact chorus. It ended up doing pretty well in the Caribbean.
It ended up on a mixtape that belonged to a hairstylist by the name of Keith Wainwright, who was a big fan of Afro-Caribbean music. He would regularly travel to Trinidad during Carnival, where he would collect and bring back tapes of the songs he heard and give them to his clients that were A&R guys in London. One of those A&R guys, Jonathan King, whose credits include discovering the band Genesis and being behind Chumbawamba’s hit “Tubthumping” (another great one hit wonder), gets the tape and likes the song so much that he records a version, released under the name Fatt Jakk and his Pack of Pets.
In parallel, there was an additional version of this song released around the same time as this Fat Jakk version by a producer named Chuck Smooth in 1998 or 1999.
Steve Greenberg happens to be friends with Jonathan King, because all A&R guys are friends, and he heard the Fat Jakk version of the song, which prompted him to decide that the Baha Men need to record it. By the way, I can’t stress this enough on our podcast, it’s amazing their were entire A&R departments at record labels 20 years ago.
It’s around this time that the Baha Men’s original vocalist Nehemiah Held retired and his nephew Omerit replaced him. The band recruited two additional younger members, and it’s these three members that you see in music video and on the album cover.
Meanwhile this song and its chant experience an American rise in popularity because of sporting events. In 1998, Mississippi State started playing the Chuck Smooth version at football games. Later, in 1999, the New Orleans Saints were playing the Fatt Jakk and his Pack of Pets version. In 2000, the Seattle Mariners began using the Baha Men version as a walk-up song for Joe Oliver, and it became so popular, A-Rod wanted to use it as his walk-up song as well (he was playing for the Mariners at the time) and later it caught on as the victory song for the team that season because the Mariners were actually good? It then gets featured at sporting events all over the world, and later is featured in several movies, including Rugrats in Paris.
Though the song dwindled in popularity after 2000, its original source was heavily disputed in legal battles over the years. In 2001 Anslem Douglas and Ossie Gurley were sued by Patrick Stephenson and Leroy Williams, the aforementiond Buffalo radio DJs, because Douglas and Gurley were getting royalties for the song. The radio DJs were able to prove that when they were recording the radio jingle at a studio in Toronto, Anslem Douglas was also a client of the same studio, and that chorus was used to write the song. The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed sum.
The song’s lawsuits, along with its disputed origin history inspired filmmaker Brent Hodge to create a documentary on the song’s popularity. He started by trying to make it his mission to edit the citations for song’s Wikipedia article because the page was a mess and the history was unclear, and so began his deep dive into “Who Let the Dogs Out” for nearly a decade. During this documentary, Hodges, who at one point owned over 300 pieces of “Who Let the Dogs Out”-themed memorabilia, tries to answer the question “Who Let the Dogs Out?”
It turns out, before anyone had recorded the chorus in a song, it was actually a chant used at sporting events, and in this documentary we find out that there are video recordings of this chant or variations of it being performed at high school sporting events in the US as early as 1986. The original author is still unknown, but ultimately we still don’t know who let the dogs out.
Since “Who Let the Dogs Out” mania, the Baha Men have gone on to release three more albums, have had covers that ended up on a few Disney compilations, made an appearance on the Bachelorette when one of the seasons took them to the Bahamas, recorded a metal version of “Who Let the Dogs Out” with the band Our Last Night, and recorded a song called “Let’s Go” in 2019, dedicated to the college teams in the Final Four.
Ultimately while I may still not know who let the dogs out, I can safely say I know more than anyone should about an often-forgotten one-hit wonder thanks to this podcast and the time the pandemic has given me to do nothing but spend over three hours researching a song that people would like to forget. And with that, I will be pouring myself another cocktail, and saying, “Get back gruffy, mash scruffy, get back you flea infested mongrel.”
