“Little Joe” is a sentimental old country song about a faithful dog. It belongs to a once-common type of tearjerker ballad — the loyal-animal song — in which a beloved dog’s devotion, and finally its death, are mourned in plain, heartfelt verses.
The song reached records in the early 1930s, in a version by the country singer Doc Hopkins, and it circulated widely thereafter among old-time and country performers. Its appeal lay in exactly the kind of unguarded sentiment that audiences of the era loved and that has kept such songs alive in traditional music long after they fell out of mainstream fashion.
“Little Joe” was recorded by a range of country and bluegrass artists, among them Norman Blake and Bill Clifton.
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