Who Let the Dogs Out release date

“Who Let The Dogs Out,” the turn-of-the-millennium-era Grammy-winning Baha Men hit, has eclipsed kitsch to become a stadium anthem. And thanks to its peculiar origin story — the hook dates back to 1959 and the song’s ownership is a copyright maze — it’s now the subject of a documentary film, which held its world premiere at SXSW over the weekend.

New Yorker Ben Sisto serves as the documentary’s expert narrator. His decade-long obsession with the smash, which began when he noticed a curious, incomplete citation on the tune’s Wikipedia page, inspired a touring one-man show. Director Brent Hodge brings the story to life, tracing the lineage of the jam backwards, chronologically, with cleverly edited interviews with the multiple musicians, industry insiders and chant purveyors of the ubiquitous phrase. In the process, the film takes viewers from to the Bahamas, Trinidad, England, Florida, New York, Seattle, Michigan and finally to Texas all in an effort to answer the timeless question: who really did let the dogs out? (See a clip from the documentary, featuring one of the many who claim to be partially responsible for the global success of the Baha Men version, above.)

Variety caught up with the filmmaker at the Austin premiere of “Who Let the Dogs Out?”

What made you want to do this documentary?
I’m always looking for “off the beaten path” stories. “Who Let The Dogs Out” was perfect … because there’s a question implicit in the title of the song that we don’t know the answer to, and also, it’s a hit song but nobody knows that there are nine different people who claim that they wrote it. Nine different people! So we started hearing versions of it from [before the hit 2000 version by Baha Men known to most] from 1996, from 1994. It’s the same hook featuring the dogs, the chant, the barking. It’s a story about copyright. It’s a story about ownership. I love the fact that people will learn something about the music industry in this film.

What makes “Who Let The Dogs Out?” more interesting than other songs that have had publishing disputes in years past and worthy of an entire documentary?
Here’s the thing. Ultimately, the song was a chant before it was a song. And it was a sports chant. The sports world is part of the reason the song was a hit anyways [thanks to the Seattle Mariners]. It comes back to 1986 in Austin, Texas. A high school in Austin came up with this chant, and we have video of the chant [from a football team] in the film and it sounds identical to the hook of the hit, which is fascinating.

Did the ownership question of the song ever get fully resolved?
It’s similar to some other song publishing disputes, in that it’s lyrics, and music. But in this case, it’s interesting, because, is a chant lyrics? Is a chant a song? Not really, it’s not. One older version of the song we feature in the film is called “Who Let The Dogs Loose” — technically that means dogs are still being let out of something, but it’s a different song.

Was it expensive to clear the master and publishing of the actual song “Who Let The Dogs Out?” You couldn’t have done the documentary well without it, and one could argue your project might increase the value of the song exponentially, if your film also becomes a hit.
It wasn’t as expensive as we initially thought it might be to clear. Universal owns the master, and BMG and a few others have the publishing. And everyone was great to work with, they all were aware of the song’s story, and they all loved [our idea for the doc]. It was a six-year legal battle [for them] that didn’t end all that long ago ….I think it ended in 2006 for the parties who were fighting over the copyrights.

Who was most responsible for the song becoming a global smash in your opinion? It seems like you implicitly tip S-Curve Records founder Steve Greenberg as the one who made it a hit in the film.
This is the best part of the story for me. It comes down to Hanson’s manager and Chumbawamba’s manager. This is straight ’90s stuff. Steve Greenberg from S-Curve Records was Hanson’s manager [at the time]. They found a hit (“Who Let The Dogs Out”), then the band they wanted for it (Baha Men). They put it together and the song became a massive success story. It was a known song already in the Caribbean. So, then you go down the line, and you find out a lot of other people released versions of the song before it was a global hit. As soon as a song gets popular, people come out of the woodwork. But yes, Steve had a vision for the song and followed through with that vision. To me, Steve is the real genius behind the song. He changed the way the song was. It takes a real talent to get that song out to the world and the song wasn’t getting that kind of love before. I personally think he let the dogs out. He doesn’t.

One fascinating aspect of the film was how sports played a role in making the song big in America…
The sports angle is a huge part of this story. And it’s a massive section of the film. When you hit stadium level sports, there’s a next level involved. We interview the marketing/promotions guy in the film for the Seattle Mariners who had a big role in making the song huge. Sports made the song big, but sports, especially football, started the song.

Another interesting part of the documentary was the Florida footage you shot. Talk about that a little bit?
Era is very important. The 1992 version of the chant that we found on a floppy disc down there in Florida comes down to an SP-1200 sampler and shows that the hook was already out there, just like the phrase “the roof is on fire” [that was used in songs in the 1980s and 1990s] was “out there” at the time. But who really owns it? Who owns a phrase? “Who Let The Dogs Out” actually was a Trinidadian term that kind of means “the boys are in the club.” It’s a slang term that was used as a sample in songs. So we ask the question [in the film] “what is ownership?” And also, like, does art just re-create more art? Is that ok? We all need inspiration from something.

So, we have to ask, who really did let the dogs out?
We all did! Without us talking about it or listening to it [still] there is no movie. It’s a phenomenon.

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Posted: April 26, 2019
Last Updated: May 02, 2019

While reading the Wikipedia entry for Baha Men's 2000 hit song Who Let the Dogs Out, unemployed artist Ben Sisto found an incomplete citation. He decided he'd complete it and fill in the blank himself.

It sounds simple enough, but from there Sisto fell down a rabbit hole of calypso, competing claims and copyright law, all in the effort to answer the age-old question: Who let the dogs out?

The story of Sisto's hunt and the answers he found are the subject of Who Let the Dogs Out, a documentary that made its Canadian premiere last month at the Calgary Underground Film Festival, and plays at the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto on May 2.

There was nothing particular about the song that attracted Sisto, a New Yorker originally from Providence, Rhode Island. He was just  bored and saw a challenge, he told Day 6 host Brent Bambury.

The documentary opens with a clip of Sisto calling Lita Rosario, a lawyer for a record company that fought Baha Men's representation for credit. In it, she accuses him of digging up old dirt.

"I understand she was defensive. This is a case that's almost 20 years-old," Sisto said, adding that if his fact-finding gets someone into trouble, "it's not my intent but it's also not my problem."

"[The Wikipedia article] said the song was heard on a float in Trinidad by a guy named Keith. But Keith's last name was not present. And I thought I should figure out who that was and fix the wiki. That's kind of all I wanted to do," Sisto said.

But once he'd tracked down Keith Wainwright, a hairstylist who'd heard the song and passed on a recording of it to music producer Jonathan King, that led him to someone else. And so on. And so on.

"There were stretches of like six months where nobody would write me back, then all of a sudden somebody would and it would propel the story forward. I kept getting sucked back into it like it was the mob or something," said Sisto.

Eventually, Sisto turned his research into a university-style lecture show. When Alberta-born director Brent Hodge saw it he was hooked, despite finding the song "extremely annoying."

"I found myself really thinking about who actually let the dogs out and why this question has probably been asked 100 times in my life and why we never really got to the bottom of that," Hodge said.

His Vancouver-based film company, Hodgee Films, teamed up with Sisto to make a movie.

The documentary took about six months to make and premiered at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in March. In the style of Al Gore's climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, it centres around Sisto doing his talk in front of an audience. 

"I always claim that I'm the Baha Men in this situation, where I just took a song that was already done and re-did it in my own way and put it out as the movie and took all the credit," Hodge said.

Baha Men released Who Let the Dogs Out in 2000 and it quickly became popular at sporting events. The song was a cover of Doggie by Anslem Douglas.

Sisto says the credit for the cover's success should go to music producer Steve Greenberg.

"He was really the one who saw this song called Doggie from Trinidad and Tobago and realized it had crossover potential, and he was the one [who] infused it with the thickness of Miami Bass and the crossover sensibilities and the rap parts," Sisto said.

"So when you hear Who Let the Dogs Out, by Baha Men – who by the way didn't even want to record it themselves – you're hearing Steve Greenberg's vision."

But did Douglas write the song that Baha Men made famous? That's where things get tricky.

Douglas says he did, but as the documentary shows, Sisto says there are at least six people who say they wrote Who Let the Dogs Out, and twice as many who say they "gave it a little extra flavour."

The most contentious element seems to be the song's famous hook: "Who let the dogs out?"

In the documentary, Sisto traces back the song's history, introducing earlier and earlier recordings that feature the hook or something very similar, such as "Who let them dogs loose."

He also introduces the people behind those songs and the legal battles they fought to get credit.

"For a lot of them, it's the closest they got to fame. I think when they're that far from something that makes this big of an impression, that makes this much money, it's got to be tough to live that close to this sizzling steak but never take a bite," Sisto said.

In the end, Sisto traced the first recorded version of the hook being used in a song back to a 1992 demo by Miami Boom Productions. That demo predates several other uses in recorded music, including Douglas' Doggie.

But the dogs don't stop there. It appears that before anyone used it in pop music, the phrase, "Who let the dogs out?" was a rallying cry for high school sports teams, barked throughout the late '80s and early '90s.

The earliest proof Sisto could find of the chant is a video of a sporting event from Reagan High School in Austin, Texas, recorded in 1986. It goes: "Who let those dogs out? Who? Who? Who? Who? Who?"

"In speaking with the players from that team, they've actually told me that it probably began 1984, maybe 1983, and there are a few rumours that it could have started with a little league team just prior to that," Sisto said.

For now, Sisto says his search is over. "If Who Let the Dogs Out goes back before the time I was born [1980], then someone else can look into it."

"You get to this point where you're like: 'Who let the dogs out? Who actually did this?' And then you're like: 'What if they all did it?'" Hodge mused.

"I don't think anyone's a charlatan. I don't think anyone's trying to cheat anybody out of anything. I think there is something that you hear and it impacts you and maybe it goes into your art. That creates more art and that's kind of the point of art," Hodge said.

To hear more from Ben Sisto and to hear some of the tunes involved, download our podcast or click 'Listen' at the top of this page.