Today’s classic song of the day is the grammatically incorrect “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” by a guy named Lobo. This track, released in March of 1971, peaked at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart. It mentions several towns and cities in its lyrics.
“Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” is about a guy, his girl, and his dog (named Boo) traveling across the country in an beat-up old car. They travel through Georgia and Minnesota (yes, as a local I can attest that there are wheat fields in or at least near St. Paul) until they finally land in Los Angeles. They were just “traveling and living off the land,” as the song tells us.
As to that less-than-grammatical title and lyrics, here’s what Mr. Lobo had to say:
“I was working on several songs, including a tune about traveling around the country with this girl, and I was trying to rhyme ‘you and me.’ Now ‘me and you’ would have been easier, but I was trying to do it with proper grammar. I couldn’t find anything to rhyme that fit what I wanted to say in the song. Finally, after I got back home to Florida, I decided to turn the phrase around to ‘me and you.’ I was thinking about it, sitting in a room that had a big sliding glass door overlooking the back yard. My big German shepherd dog, Boo, came running around the corner and looked in at me. I said: ‘Well, now, that’s kinda freaky. How about putting ‘a dog named Boo’ into the song?’ That’s literally how it came about. All of a sudden the song really started coming together. I hadn’t been to any of the places mentioned in the song except Georgia, but I just kept putting in places that sounded far away like Minneapolis and LA.”
Lobo, the artist and writer of the song, was a guy with the given name Kent LaVoie. A Florida native, Mr. LaVoie joined his first band in 1961. (That band, the Rumours, included future big-time artists Gram Parsons and Jim Stafford, a fairly unusual combination of talents.) He played with a number of other bands throughout the decade and released his first solo album in 1969. He started calling himself Lobo (which is Spanish for “wolf”) in 1971 when he signed with Big Tree Records. His first single for that label was “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo,” and several other singles followed, including “I’d Love You to Want Me” and “Don’t Expect Me to Be Your Friend.”
Even though the hits dried up by the mid-1970s, Lobo has continued to tour and record over the years. He’s particularly popular in Southeast Asia, for some reason.
