Songfacts®:

• This song is a duet between Dead Weather vocalist Alison Mosshart and drummer Jack White - the pair wrote the song together. Mosshart told Mojo magazine July 2009 that it "started out with just me singing and is now a duet. He just sat up one day and said, 'I'll do this,' and that made it so good I was jumping up and down and hugging him."
• It's not out of character for Jack White and Alison Mosshart to write a song about a rocking horse - and make it spooky. She writes very dark lyrics and he's steeped in the blues, which bubbles up here in this tale about a person who has danced with the Devil and finds himself looking at an old rocking horse that just nods his head. We get the sense that this horse could end up in the Occult Museum next to Annabelle.
• "Rocking Horse" is part of the first Dead Weather album, Horehound. The band formed after Mosshart's band The Kills opened some shows for Jack White's The Raconteurs in 2008. Initially, they were going to record just a one-off single with Raconteurs bass player Jack Lawrence, but it evolved into a full album and a full band when they added Dean Fertita from Queens Of The Stone Age.
  
  Jack White produced the album, which they recorded in just three weeks at his new digs in Nashville, Third Man Studios.
• Jack Lawrence and Dean Fertita switched roles on this track, with Fertita on bass and Lawrence on guitar. The group members can all play various instruments, so this kind of swapping wasn't uncommon.
• The song was used in a 2023 Toyota commercial where a black Prius drives around in a world populated by sheep. It's a rare case of Jack White licensing a song for an ad.