Mitch Jayne and Rodney Dillard wrote “Dooley” for the Dillards, the band they had formed with Doug Dillard and Dean Webb in Salem, Missouri. The band moved to Los Angeles in 1962 and signed with Elektra within weeks. The song came out in 1963 on their first album, Back Porch Bluegrass, produced by Jim Dickson, with Doug Dillard on banjo, Webb on mandolin, Rodney Dillard on guitar and Jayne on bass. Elektra also issued it as a single in May 1963, with Doug Dillard’s banjo piece “Doug’s Tune” on the other side.
The William Morris Agency, which also signed the band that year, booked them onto The Andy Griffith Show. They first appeared there on 18 March 1963, in “The Darlings Are Coming,” as the all-but-silent sons of the mountain patriarch Briscoe Darling, played by Denver Pyle. “Dooley” was one of the songs the Darlings played on the show.
The song is a comic portrait of a moonshiner. Dooley lives below the mill with two daughters and a forty-gallon still: one daughter watches the boiler and the other the spout, while their mother corks the bottles. The revenuers come for him through the woods and never catch him. When he comes to town to trade, it is for sugar by the bushel and molasses by the ton. The chorus follows him “slippin’ up the holler” trying to make a dollar, and the singer begs a swallow on credit. The last verses bury him: the women are not sorry, the men stand round and cry, and on the mountain they put a jug beside his grave and a barrel for his stone.
The Grascals opened their 2010 album Dance ’Til Your Stockings Are Hot and Ravelin’ with it, recorded at the Sound Kitchen in Franklin, Tennessee. Rodney Dillard returned to it the same year with the Dillard Band on I Wish Life Was Like Mayberry (Rural Rhythm). Tony Trischka’s Earl Jam (2024) has a version sung by Molly Tuttle and Sam Bush.
