Songfacts®:

• This sorrowful tune is the flipside to "Here You Come Again," the hit title track to Dolly Parton's pop breakthrough album. In this one, a little girl who was abandoned by her mother and neglected by her drunken father shows up on someone's doorstep with her little dog, Andy, in tow. She and her furry friend are given a warm bed for the night but both of them die in their sleep. On a more positive note, they reunite in heaven so they can always be together.
• While critics dismissed the tune for being too maudlin, the Tonight Show audience gave Dolly lots of love when she performed it during her debut appearance on January 19, 1977 - which also happened to be her 31st birthday.
• Dolly admitted this was an odd little number for a pop album, but she wanted to include some of her own compositions on the record, which include tracks by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil ("Here You Come Again"), Kenny Rogers ("Sweet Music Man"), John Sebastian ("Lovin' You"), and Bobby Goldsboro ("Cowgirl & The Dandy").
• Dolly cut this from her nightclub act after an angry drunk man heckled her for singing it at a Las Vegas show. She recalled in her 2020 book, Songteller: "This guy in the audience hollered out, 'Don't sing that damn song in a nightclub! It's bad enough that the kid died! Did you have to kill the damn dog, too?' I thought, 'Well maybe he's right. Or maybe he's the daddy in the song who's drunk again.' So I took it out of my club act, where people drink. I thought, 'It's hard enough for regular people who ain't drunk to deal with some of the sorrow that I throw at 'em.' Some people want to kick my ass for writing such sorrowful songs. That guy cussed me out, big time."
• Dolly has a couple other songs about dearly departed dogs: "Cracker Jack" and "Gypsy, Joe And Me."
• Dolly aimed to crossover with her previous album, New Harvest…First Gathering, but although it became her first #1 Country album, it didn't make a big impression in the pop realm. Undeterred, she enlisted producer Gary Klein, who helped Glen Campbell go mainstream with "Southern Nights" earlier in 1977. That did the trick. Here You Come Again peaked at #20 in the US, her highest entry on the albums chart up to that point, and its lead single went to #3 on the Hot 100. It also landed at #2 on the Country Albums tally.