Just make sure his ears are covered when you do that song. He's too young - still - for those lyrics, lol.
The song got its name from a very old, sweet, nameless black Lab at Headley Grange, where both Led Zeppelin and Bad Company recorded some of their most famous songs.
Loudersound.com article from 2020 on the making of Led Zeppelin IV:
https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-triumph-of-the-gentleman-rockers-how-led-zeppelin-iv-was-made
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Tour manager Richard Cole noted: “There weren’t any serious drugs around the band at that point, just dope and a bit of coke. Mostly we had an account at a shop in the village and we’d go down there and collect large quantities of cider. They were playing at being country squires. They found an old shotgun and used to shoot at squirrels in the woods. Not that they ever hit any. And there was this lovely old black Labrador dog wandering around which we used to feed.”
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The richness of the Bron-Yr-Aur sessions was also apparent. Although Page and Plant had written The Battle Of Evermore on the run at the Grange, other songs that took the same remit of acoustic guitar, mandolin and traditional influence had begun in Snowdonia. Going To California was written there and recorded later at the Grange. Other, more random factors were at work, too. Like the old black dog that used to hang around the Grange’s kitchen.
“We didn’t know his name, we just used to call him Black Dog,” Jimmy recalls. When the dog went missing one night, only to return and spend the whole of the next day sleeping it off, John Paul Jones decided “it was the perfect image” for a barrelrollin’ riff he was noodling with. The result: one of the most swaggering, psycho-sexual monsters in the Zep canon: Black Dog.
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More about that dog, from a 2015 interview with Paul Rodgers of Bad Company:
https://www.loudersound.com/features/paul-rodgers-talks-bad-company
How did it make you feel to revisit those first two albums and that mid-’70s period?
“Well, it’s a mixed feeling, really. It’s kind of like going back in time. But at this point in my life, it’s not unhappy. They were great days. When we first went to Headley Grange, it was a very organic way of recording, with Ronnie Lane’s Mobile Studio outside this big old mansion that was full of amazing treasures, everywhere you went. And it was completely deserted. There were all these cars in the garage and everything, with a layer of dust over them.”
The official verdict, then: was Headley Grange haunted?
“Well, there was an old dog that hung around there. I told Jimmy Page about this dog, years later, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, we named Black Dog after that’. It was kind of like the house dog. We’d give it food. But then, one day, I found it lying in the lobby, very distressed. And I called the vet in, and he said to me, ‘Y’know, he’s got a twisted bowel, and you can spend five grand trying to get him fixed, or we can do the merciful thing and put him down right now’. So in the end, the two of us decided, y’know, ‘I think we should put him down, bless him’. From that moment on, we had some very strange dog experiences.”
Paul, like Jimmy Page, believed for a number of reasons that Headley Grange was haunted. But I haven't found anything specific about the "strange dog experiences."
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