Episode 15: “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton

A History of Folk Music and Five Hundred Songs

by Andrew Higgins.

Episode 15

Hound Dog

by Big Mama Thornton.

One of the things that is easy to miss when talking about early rock and roll is that much of the development of the genre is about the liminal spaces in race in America.

Before I start talking about this, a disclaimer I have to make.

I'm a white person from a different country, born decades after the events I'm talking about.

I'm trying to be as accurate as I can here,

and as sensitive as possible.

But I apologize if I mess up, and nothing I say here should be taken as more accurate or authoritative than the words of people who were actually affected.

Black and white are two categories imposed by culture, and like all culturally imposed binaries, they're essentially arbitrary and don't really map very well onto really existing people.

There have always been people who don't neatly fit into the boxes that a racist society insists everyone fits into.

And part of the reason that rock and roll happened when it did was that in the 1950s, America was in the process of redefining those boxes and moving some people who would have previously fit into one category into the other.

The lines were being redrawn, and that led to some interesting art happening at the borders.

That sounds like I'm doing the at least some good art came from this terrible event thing.

I'm really, really

not.

Racism, in all its forms, is nothing but negative, and its distortions of culture are all negative too.

But they do exist, and need noting when talking about culture, subject to those distortions.

There were a lot of groups who would now be regarded as white in the USA, but who back in the 1940s and 50s weren't quite.

Jewish people, for example, were still legally discriminated against in a lot of places, unlike now, where they're merely illegally discriminated against.

They weren't black, but they weren't quite white either.

The same went for several other ethnic minorities, like Greek people.

So it's perhaps not all that surprising that one of the most successful blues records of all time, which later inspired an even more successful rock and roll record, was the result of a collaboration between a black singer, a Greek-American producer, who said, As a kid, I decided that if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black, and two Jewish songwriters.

Willie Maythornton was big in every sense.

She weighed 350 pounds, or about 75 stone, and she had a voice to match it.

She would often claim that she didn't need a microphone because she was louder than any microphone anyway.

We've talked in this series about blues shouters and how they were mostly men, but she was at least the equal of any man as a shouter.

She became a blues singer when she was 14, thanks to her mentor, a singer called Diamond Teeth Mary.

Yes, keep your hands off of me, we sure don't belong to you.

He's mine online, and

That's a recording of Diamond Teeth Mary from the 1990s when she was in her nineties.

She performed constantly until her death aged ninety seven, but she only made her first record when she was ninety two.

Diamond Teeth Mary was the half sister of the great blue singer Bessie Smith.

Mary had four stepmothers, one of whom was Smith's mother, and she was a powerful singer herself, singing with the hot Harlem review around Alabama.

She was called Diamond Teeth Mary because she had diamonds embedded in her front teeth, so she'd be more imposing on stage.

Diamond Teeth Mary heard the young Willie May Thornton singing while she was working on her garbage truck, got her to get off the garbage truck, and got her a job with the revue.

Mary probably felt a kinship with the fourteen-year-old Willie May, a girl who only wore boys' clothes.

Mary had, herself, become a performer when she was only thirteen, having run away from her her abusive family, dressed in boys' clothes, and joined the circus.

Willie Maethornton stayed with that review for most of the next decade, playing with musicians like Richard Pennyman, who would later become known as Little Richard, playing to audiences that were mostly black and also, according to Little Richard, exclusively gay.

The Hot Harlem Review was not exactly respectable.

Sammy Green, who managed it, made most of his money from owning several rotals.

But it was somewhere that a young singer could very quickly learn how to be an entertainer.

You had to be impressive as a female blues singer in the 1940s, especially if, as with William A.

Thornton, you were also not conventionally attractive and not of a societally approved sexuality or gender identity.

I have seen suggestions from people who would know that Thornton was bisexual, but from others like Johnny Otis that she showed no interest in men or women, though she did have a child in her teens.

And I've also seen suggestions that she may have been trans, though I'm going to refer to her using she and her pronouns here, as that's what she used throughout her life.

She was a remarkable figure in many ways.

One of her favourite drinks was embalming fluid and grape juice.

Just in case anyone was considering doing this, please don't.

It's really not a good idea at all, even a little bit.

Don't drink embalming fluid.

According to Jerry Lieber, she had razor scars all over her face.

She was a very, very intimidating person.

At the very least, she didn't fit into neat boxes.

But you see, all that stuff I just said, that is putting her into a box.

The caricature, angry, aggressive, black woman.

And that was a box she never liked to be put in either, but which she was put in by other people.

What I just said, you'll notice, is all about what other people thought of her, and that's not always what she thought of herself.

She would get very upset that people would say she used to fight promoters, saying, I never did fight the promoters.

All I ever did was ask them for my money.

Pay me, and there won't be no hard feelings.

And while she is uniformly described as masculine looking, whatever that means, she put it rather differently, saying, I don't go out on stage trying to look pretty.

I was born pretty.

Thornton is someone who didn't get to tell her own story much.

Much of what we know about her is from other people's impressions of her, and usually the impressions of men.

People who knew her well described her as intelligent, kind, charming, funny, and hugely talented, while people who only spent a brief time around her tend to have talked about the razor scars on her face or how aggressive she seemed.

Depending on which narrative you choose, you can make a very good case for her being either a loud, swaggering, vulgar, aggressive stereotype of unfeminine black femininity, or a rather sweet, vulnerable person who intimidated men simply by her physical size, her race, and her loud voice, and who may have played up to their expectations at times, but who never liked that, and who used alcohol and other other substances to cope with what wasn't a very happy life while remaining outwardly happy.

But because we as a society value black women so little, most of this story is filtered through the white men who told it.

So be aware that in what follows, you may find yourself picturing a caricature figure, seeing Big Mama as the angry, sassy black woman you've seen in a million films.

She was a real person, and I wish we had more of her own words to set against this.

While the Hot Harlem Review was a good place to learn to be an entertainer, it wasn't necessarily the best place to work if you actually wanted to earn a living, and Willie May had to supplement her income by shining shoes.

She often had to sleep in all-night restaurants and bars because she couldn't afford to pay rent and go begging door to door for food.

But she would pretend to everyone she knew that everything was all right and smile for everyone.

She became pregnant in her teens and tried to be a good mother to the child, but she was deemed an unfit mother due to poverty and the child was taken away from her.

After several years with the Harlem Review, she quit them because she was being cheated out of money and decided to stay in Houston, Texas, which is where she really started to build an audience.

Around this time, she recorded her first single, Alright Baby, credited to the Harlem Stars.

It's a song she wrote herself, and it's a boogie track, very much in the vein of Big Joe Turner.

Yeah, hell bad man, don't want nobody up.

Well he love me in the morning, love me lady now

If he don't love me, you know I don't be right

Shortly after moving to Houston, she began working for Don Roby, who ran Peacock Records and the Bronze Peacock Club.

Roby had a mixed reputation.

Most singers and musicians he worked with thought highly of him, but most songwriters he worked with were less enamoured of his penchant for stealing their money and credit.

Roby had a reputation as a thug, too, but, according to Little Richard, he was too scared of Thornton to beat her up like he would his other acts.

She recorded several singles for Peacock, starting with I'm All Fed Up, but her talents talents weren't really suited to the slick Texas Blues backing she was given.

Before I can stop and rest,

The kind of music Peacock put out was in the smoother style that was becoming prominent in the southwestern US.

The kind of music that people like Lightning Hopkins made.

And that wasn't really suited to Thornton's louder, more emotional style.

But after a run of unsuccessful singles, things started to change.

Peacock Records was in the process of expanding.

Don Roby acquired another label, Duke Records of Memphis, and merged them, and he got distributors working with him in different areas of the country.

And he started working with Johnny Otis.

Otis came to Texas, and he and Roby made a deal.

Otis would audition several of the acts that were on Duke and Peacock Records, people like Thornton, who had not had much success but clearly had talent, and he would incorporate them into his Johnny Otis review.

Otis would take charge of producing their records, which would be cut in Los Angeles with Otis's band, and he would let Roby release the results.

Some of the artists still couldn't find their commercial potential, even with Otis producing.

For example, Little Richards' recordings with Otis, while interesting, have an artistic dead end for him.

Yes, it's still Richard Boogie, Boogie Woodhall.

Yes, it's still Richard Boogie, Boogie Wood of

Of course, Little Richard went on to do quite well for himself later.

But in the case of Willie May Thornton, something clicked.

The two became lifelong friends and also began a remarkable collaboration, with Otis being the first person to encourage Thornton to play harmonica as well as sing on stage.

On her first show with the Johnny Otis review, Willie Maid Thornton sang Have Mercy Baby, the then covenant hit by Billy Ward and the Dominoes, and the audience went so wild that they had to stop the show.

After that point, they had to put Thornton at the top of the bill, even after Little Esther, so the audience would allow the other performers to come on.

And with the top billing came a change of name.

Johnny Otis had a knack for giving artists new names.

As well as Little Esther, he also gave Etta James and Sugar Pie De Santo their stage names.

And in the case of William A.

Thornton, for the rest of her career she was known as Big Mamma Thornton.

At the time we're talking about, Otis was, as much as a musician, a fixer, a wheeler dealer, a person who brought people together.

And this was a a role that those people on the margins of whiteness, like Otis, a son of Greek immigrants who chose to live among black culture, excelled in.

The people who were on the borderline between the two different conceptions of race often ended up as backroom facilitators, bringing white money to black artists.

People like Milt Gabler, or Ahmet Ertigan, or Cosimo Matasa, people of ethnicities that didn't quite fit into the black-white binary, people who were white enough to use white privilege to get financing, but not so white they identified with the majority culture.

And in 1952, the people Otis brought together were Big Mama Thornton and two young songwriters who would change the world of music.

Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller were Jewish teenagers, both of whom had moved to California from elsewhere.

Stoller from New York and Lieber from Maryland.

Mike Stoller was a musician who was into modern jazz and modern art music.

He loved Bartock and Thelonius Monk, but he also had a background in stride and boogie woogie.

After he found normal piano lessons uncongenial, he'd been offered lessons by the great James P.

Johnson.

who had taught him how to play boogie.

James P.

Johnson was essentially the the inventor of jazz piano.

He'd started out playing ragtime and had invented the stride piano style that Johnson had taught to Fats Waller.

He'd been one of the performers at the Spiritual Sauswing concerts and was also a major composer of serious music.

But what he taught young Mike Stoller was how to play a boogie bass line, how to understand twelve-bar blues structure, and other rudiments of the blues pianist's art.

As Stoller later put it, it was as if Beethoven were about to give me a lesson, except that, unlike James P.

Johnson, Beethoven had never given a piano lesson to Fat Swaller.

After moving to LA, Stoller started studying with Arthur Lange, a composer of film soundtracks, and playing piano for jazz bands, jamming with people like Chet Baker.

Meanwhile, Jerry Lieber was a blues fanatic who had had a minor epiphany after hearing Jimmy Witherspoon's Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do.

If I

attend church all day Sunday,

yes, in cavarette all day Monday,

ain't nobody to fear

if I do

Lieber had heard Witherspoon's song and realised that he could do that, and he decided he was going to.

He was going to become a songwriter, and he started working on song lyrics immediately, although he had no idea how to go about getting anyone to perform them.

The first song he wrote was called Real Ugly Woman.

The lyrics went, She's a real ugly woman, don't see how she got that way.

Every time she comes round, she runs all my friends away.

He didn't have much knowledge of the music business, but luckily that knowledge walked right through the door.

Lieber was working at a small record store, and one day Lester Sill, who was the national sales manager for Modern Records, walked into the shop.

Modern Records was one of the dozens of tiny blues labels that were springing up across the country, usually run by Jewish and Italian entrepreneurs who could see the potential in black music even if the owners of the major labels couldn't, and Sill was a real enthusiast for the music he was selling.

He started pitching records to Jerry Lieber, telling him he'd love them.

acting as if Lieber was the most important person in the world.

Even though Lieber kept explaining he didn't make the buying decisions for the shop, he was only a shop assistant.

Eventually, after playing a record called Boogie Chillin by a new artist called John Lee Hooker, which excited Lieber enormously, Sill asked Lieber what he was going to do when he grew up.

Lieber replied that he was already grown up, but he planned to become a songwriter.

Sill asked to hear one of the songs, and Lieber sang Real Ugly Woman to him.

Sil liked it, and asked for copies of his songs.

When Lieber explained that he didn't know how to write music, Sil told him to find a partner who did.

Lieber found Stuller through a mutual friend, who told Lieber that Stuller knew about music.

Lieber phoned Stuller, who was unimpressed by the idea of writing songs together.

because to his mind, songs were the kind of thing that was dominating the pop charts at the time, the kind of thing that Patty Page or someone would record.

Not something someone who was into hard bop music would like.

But Lieber eventually persuaded him to at least take a look at the lyrics he'd been writing.

Stoller looked at the lyrics to Real Ugly Woman and said, These are blues.

You didn't tell me you were writing blues.

I love the blues.

They started collaborating together that day, in 1950, and worked together for the rest of their lives.

Soon, Jimmy Witherspoon himself was singing Real Ugly Woman, just like Lieber had hoped when he'd started writing.

Soon after, Ralph Bass moved to LA from New York.

He'd got to know Lieber and Stoller on their trips east, and when he moved west, he introduced them to Johnny Otis, who Bass had kept in touch with after leaving Savoy Records.

Through the connection with Otis and Bass, they wrote many songs for Little Esther, and they also started a partnership with Little Esther's former backing vocalists, The Robins, who put out the very first single with her Lieber and Stoller writing for it.

That's what the good book says.

a rubber hose.

And the women, they wore transparent clothes.

That's what the good books said for.

That's what the good books said for.

Now Moses said to old Pharaohs, you'll have to let my

people go if you don't take the change off yourself.

The partnership between the Lieber and Stoller team and the Robins would end up defining all their careers.

But right now, Lieber and Stoller were a couple of teenagers who were working with their heroes, and at least one of those heroes was not very impressed.

Johnny Otis had introduced them to Big Mama Thornton and asked if they had a song for her.

They said we don't, but we will have in a few minutes, ran back to Stoller's house, and quickly knocked out Hound Dog in a style that they thought would suit Thornton.

Hound Dog was, at the time, black slang for a giggolo, and what Lieber and Stoller wanted to do was have a song that was as aggressive as possible, with their singer demeaning the man she was singing to, while also including sexual undertones.

Those undertones were strengthened in the follow-up Thornton recorded, Tomcat, where she told a Tomcat, I ain't going to feed you fish no more.

Lieber and Stoller had very strong ideas about how their new song should be performed, and they'd made the mistake of telling her about them.

Big Mamma Thornton was not about to let two white teenagers teach her how to sing the blues.

Big Mamma Thornton was only a few years older than those kids.

They were in their late teens and she was in her mid twenties.

But that kind of gap can seem like a big difference, and it might well also be that Thornton was offended by the fact that these white men were telling her, a black woman, how to do her job.

So when Jerry Lieber insisted that rather than croon the song as she had been doing, she should attack it, her response was to point to her crotch and say, attack this.

Johnny Otis didn't help by playing a rim shot right after Thornton said that, but he then suggested that Lieber sing it for Thornton, and she did listen and agreed to try it that way.

Once the communication problem had been sorted, Thornton turned in the definitive performance of the song.

You ain't nothing but a hound

It's new palomador

You ain't nothing but a hound

It's new palomador

You can wag your tail,

but I ain't gonna feed you no more

Hound Dog is also notable as being one of the last times Johnny Otis played drums on a record.

While he could still play the vibraphone, he could no longer hold his drumsticks properly, and so he'd largely given up drumming.

But when they were working out the arrangement for the recording session, Otis played the drums in the rehearsals, playing with the style of his own, turning the snare off on his snare drum so it sounded more like a tom-tom.

When it came to the actual recording though, Otis was in the control room while a session drummer was playing in the studio.

But Lieber and Stoller both agreed that he simply wasn't playing the part properly.

and enticed Otis into the studio and got him to play the part as he'd been playing it in rehearsal.

What happened next is a subject of much debate.

What everyone is agreed on is that Otis was credited as a co-writer early on, but he wasn't credited later.

The story as Otis told it is that he did actually help Lieber and Stoller pull the song together, rewriting it with them, as well as doing the arrangement in the studio.

which no one disputes him doing.

He claimed specifically that he came up with the lines, You made me feel so blue, you make me weep and moan, you ain't looking for a woman, you're just looking for a home, because Lieber and Stoller had had, quote, some derogatory crap in there, that he'd had to remove references to chicken and watermelon, and that he constantly had to edit their songs.

He said that Lieber and Stoller acknowledged that he was a co-writer, right up until the point where Elvis Presley wanted to record the song a few years later.

Lieber and Stoller, on the other hand, claimed that Otis had no involvement with the songwriting, and that he'd misrepresented himself to Don Roby.

They claimed that Otis had falsely claimed he had power of attorney for them, as well as falsely claiming to have co-written the song, and deliberately defrauded them.

On the other hand, It's only because of Otis that Lieber and Stoller got credit at all.

Don Roby, who as I've mentioned was a notorious thief of writing credit, originally put himself and Thornton down as the writers, and it was Otis who got the credits amended.

Either way, Lieber and Stoller have, for more than sixty years, had the sole song writing credits for the track, and Otis never bothered to dispute their claim in court.

Indeed, they don't appear to have had any particular animosity they all repeatedly praised the other's abilities.

Although, as Otis put it, I could have sent my kids to college, like they sent theirs.

But oh well, if I dwell on that, I get quite unhappy, so we tried to move on.

What's most ridiculous about the whole credit mess is that Elvis's version bore almost no resemblance to the song Lieber and Stoller wrote.

Elvis's version was a cover of her version by the white Vegas lounge band, Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys, which was more or less a parody of the original.

hound dog, crying all the time.

You ain't nothing but a hound dog, hound dog, crying all the time.

Well, now you never caught a rabbit, you ain't no friend of mine.

Well, I said you were high class,

that was just a line.

They said you were high class,

that was just a lion.

But still, Elvis came later, as did the money.

In 1953, all Lieber and Stoller got for a record that sold over a million copies was a cheque for $1,200.

A cheque which bounced.

As a result of their experience getting ripped off by Roby, Lieber and Stoller formed their own record label with Lester Sill, and we'll be hearing more about that later.

Big Mama Thornton did actually get paid for Hermillion Seller a whole five hundred dollars, but she never had the success she deserved.

She later wrote the song Ball and Chain.

I said, Oh,

baby.

Why do you wanna?

Why do you wanna do this mean thing to me?

I said, Oh,

oh,

baby.

Why

Janice Joplin later had a hit with that, and you can hear from Thornton's version just how much Joplin took from Thornton's vocal style.

But due to a bad contract, Thornton never made a penny in royalties from the song she wrote, which is a far more egregious injustice than the one people complain about, that Elvis had a hit with Hound Dog.

She didn't write that one, and Elvis did pay the writers.

She continued performing until a few days before she died, in July 1984.

Despite getting so sick and losing so much weight, she was under a hundred pounds at the end, that she was almost unrecognisable.

She died two weeks before Little Esther.

And like Esther, she had asked Johnny Otis, now the Reverend Johnny Otis, to give her eulogy.

Otis said, in part

Mamma always told me that the blues were more important than having money.

She told me Artists are artists and businessmen are businessmen.

But the trouble is the artist's money stays in the businessmen's hands.

Don't waste your sorrow on Big Mamma.

She is free.

Don't feel sorry for Big Mamma.

There's no more pain, no more suffering in a society where the colour of skin was more important than the quality of your talent.

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is written, produced, and performed by Andrew Hickey.

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