"Hound Dog" - Big Mama Thornton

On Being Remembered

A rock originator remains in the shadow of Elvis.

The nonprofit Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls was founded in 2004 to offer free music education for BIPOC girls and gender-expansive youth. The program’s namesake is rock n roll ancestor Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton. The program might be Thornton’s most precious legacy since she isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and has never been on the cover of Rolling Stone. There is no Hollywood biopic of her life. 

Thornton’s name is usually a footnote in larger discussions about Elvis Presley or Janis Joplin.  She recorded the original versions of songs that made Presley and Joplin famous —  “Hound Dog” and “Ball ‘n’ Chain.” And she’s among the hallowed group of gospel and blues architects, like Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Little Richard, who erected the first building blocks of what we now call rock n roll. Like her contemporaries, that influence has been consumed, usurped, and discarded by white America. 

But at least the staff at Willie Mae Rock Camp keep her memory alive as an artist who transgressed gender and racial barriers and paved the way for generations of women and non-binary musicians. They know that this gender-bending, self-taught singer, drummer, and harmonica player deserves to be remembered among rock n roll’s dearest of heroes. 

“Hound Dog” was written for her to sing. In 1952, budding songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were asked to meet an up-and-coming blues singer with a booming voice and big personality. Willie Mae Thornton was unlike any blues singer on the scene. Her nickname, “Big Mama,” was earned by standing over six feet tall. Her voice was just as commanding. And she wore men’s clothing, eschewing traditional women’s fashion.  According to Maureen Mahon in the essay, Listening for Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton's voice: the sound of race and gender transgressions in rock and roll, “Thornton made a conscious choice to present herself onstage in ways that many thought signaled she was a lesbian.” There is no documentation of any of Thornton’s relationships but according to Mahon, “I find it difficult to imagine that she would have been unaware of this possibility, so what is significant to me is that she was comfortable projecting this image in the years before gay liberation. In other words, she didn't try to appear straight. These choices are evidence of an unconventional, transgressive, and liberated form of black femininity that rejects prevailing expectations of how women should comport themselves to secure respectability.”

Songwriters Leiber and Stoller were captivated by Thornton’s performance. After 5 minutes, the pair jumped in their car and sped home to write something worthy of her star quality. “She knocked me cold,” Leiber told Rolling Stone in 1990. It took them 15 minutes to write the song. “We drove to my house, wrote the song, and then turned around and rode it back to Big Mama.” “Hound Dog” gave Big Mama Thornton a No. 1 hit on the R&B charts in 1953. The song was released six months after being recorded, and Thornton had almost forgotten about it until hearing it on the radio on the way to a show. 

“I was going to the theater and I just turned the radio on in the car and the man said, ‘Here’s a record that’s going nationwide: ‘Hound Dog’ by Willie Mae Thornton.’ I said, ‘That’s me!’ I hadn’t heard the record in so long,” she said in an interview with the Arhoolie Foundation. “So that evening I sang it on the show, and everybody went for it. ‘Hound Dog’ just took off like a jet.”

The song spent seven weeks at No. 1. It became Peacock Records’ best-selling single of all time and spawned almost a dozen cover versions before landing in the hands of the man they’d soon call the “king” of rock n roll. In 1956, three years after Thornton’s release, Presley had become smitten with a bleach-stained version of “Hound Dog” by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys. They’d stripped out the growling blues sound and changed the lyrics, which were originally about a woman’s declaration of independence from a cheating partner. Now it’s about a literal dog. 

Thornton’s version:

You ain't nothin' but a hound dog

Been snoopin' 'round my door

You ain't nothin' but a hound dog

Been snoopin' 'round my door

You can wag your tail

But I ain't gonna feed you no more

Freddie Bell and the Bellboys (and Presley’s) version:

You ain't nothin' but a hound dog

Cryin' all the time

You ain't nothin' but a hound dog

Cryin' all the time

Well, you ain't never caught a rabbit

And you ain't no friend of mine

Presley’s version sold over 10 million copies, launching him into superstardom. It sat on the Billboard pop chart for 11 weeks, a record that stood for 36 years until Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” in 1992. 

Presley’s version of “Hound Dog” was marketed to a wider audience than Thornton’s because of his access as a white artist to the mainstream and its larger audiences. “Popular music history is filled with examples of Black women being pushed to the margins,” says Gayle Wald, professor of American Studies at George Washington University, to the Washington Post. “The first [vocal] blues songs that were ever recorded [in the 1910s], were recorded by white singers. It wasn’t until 1920, when Mamie Smith put out ‘Crazy Blues,’ that a Black woman actually was on record singing a blues song, even though blues was an African American art form.”

Presley’s stardom turned the burgeoning genre of rock n roll into a lucrative empire, and the Black artists who invented the music were collateral damage. Though Thornton originated “Hound Dog” and made it a hit on the Black charts, she earned almost nothing for its success. “That song sold over 2 million records. I got one check for $500 and never saw another,” she told Jet magazine. 

According to author Michael Spörke, who wrote Big Mama Thornton: The Life and Music, Presley never acknowledged any debt to Thornton and declined to perform with her. By 1957, Presley’s version of “Hound Dog” was so huge that most people had either forgotten or had never heard Thornton’s. 

A similar tragedy would befall Thornton when she wrote and recorded the song “Ball ‘n’ Chain” for Bay-Tone Records. The song was penned in 1960. But the label chose not to release it until 1968 and held onto the copyright — which meant that, initially, Thornton was cheated out of the royalties when Janis Joplin recorded the number in 1967. In an attempt to help, Joplin, who frequently cited Thornton as an influence, invited her to tour as the opening act. By 1968, Thornton had begun receiving a windfall from the eventual royalties and, thanks to Joplin, there was a renewed interest in Thornton’s career.  “I gave her the right and the permission to make ‘Ball ‘n’ Chain,’” Thornton said after Joplin’s death. “She was my idol before she passed away… and I thank her for helping me.”

As her career waned throughout the ‘70s, Thornton became an alcoholic, and her health suffered. She died in poverty in a Los Angeles boarding house in 1984. She was only 57.

After a 1971 performance, Craig McGregor, a reporter for the New York Times wrote, “If she had anything like the opportunities or skillful management which inferior white artists get she would have a band of her own, for a start. And there would be half a dozen shrewd heads watching her performance, analyzing and criticizing it, polishing it . . . she probably won’t make that crucial breakthrough and will remain just another black singer whose music is ripped off by white imitators who have the necessary money and time, and (to be fair) the taste to realize the music they borrow is better than their own.”

Both “Hound Dog” and “Ball ‘n’ Chain” were named by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as among the “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.” Thornton herself has never been inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame, where she’d be alongside Presley and Joplin. She hasn’t even been nominated. 

But there are those who still remember. Hundreds of girls and gender-expansive youth at the Willie Mae Rock Camp “rock it out” in Thornton’s footsteps each year, hopefully marching towards a more equitable future.

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