Songs That Made Rock ‘n’ Roll: Big Mama Thornton and Elvis Unleash a Howling Hit With “Hound Dog”
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n 1952, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were asked to meet a young new blues singer. Little did they know it would inspire not just one of their greatest songs but one of the most important in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.
The budding songwriters were still teenagers and it’s fair to say that when they first met Big Mama Thornton she made a big impression. “We saw Big Mama and she knocked me cold,” Leiber told Rolling Stone in 1990. “She looked like the baddest, saltiest chick you would ever see.”
Meeting the colorful 25 year old singer with the big voice, big presence and big personality was all they needed and the pair jumped in their car already with ideas running through their talented young heads of the perfect song for Thornton. “We drove back to my house and then turned around, wrote the song, and then turned around, and rode it back to Big Mama,” Stoller recalled years later.
Amazingly it took them just minutes to write “Hound Dog” and the song would not only give Big Mama Thornton a #1 R&B hit but a few years later would become a massive hit for a young, handsome quivering lipped rock and roller: Elvis Presley.
While many may not realize that “Hound Dog” was originally a hit for another singer, notably a black woman, fewer still probably know it was written for her by two Jewish teenagers with an intense love of the blues.
Leiber and Stoller were both just 17 when they first met through a mutual friend in 1950. Although both lived in Los Angeles neither were California natives. Stoller grew up in Long Island, New York and started to learn piano after hearing the sounds of boogie-woogie for the first time while away at camp when he just eight years old.
Leiber on the other hand grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and, after originally being interested in the theater, had his Road to Damascus 
musical moment when he heard Jimmy Witherspoon’s “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” on the radio. “I can’t explain my reaction but at that moment I was transported to a realm of mystical understanding,” Leiber wrote in their autobiography, Hound Dog. “The light came on. Witherspoon turned on the light.” Suddenly Leiber knew that he wanted to be a songwriter, which led him to taking a part time job in a record store. One day he sang one of his new tunes for a visiting salesman from blues label Modern Records who was impressed enough to ask for sheet music. Problem was Leiber couldn’t write music but luckily he had a friend who knew someone who did.
At this point Stoller was playing in band and privately studying composition with composer Arthur Lange. When Leiber first called him asking if he was interesting in writing songs with him, Stoller wasn’t keen to say the least. “I said I wasn’t interested in writing pop songs,” he told Marc Myers of Jazzwax. “Less than an hour later, Jerry showed up at my front door with pages of lyrics. When I saw they were in the form of 12-bar blues, I agreed to write with him.”
The first song the new songwriting team of Leiber & Stoller got produced was “That’s What The Good Book Says,” released by The Robins (who later became The Coasters) released by Modern Records, the label that had inspired Leiber to seek out a writing partner. If this wasn’t impressive enough, just a month later they got their second sale for the song “Real Ugly Woman,” and it was none other than Jimmy Witherspoon himself who sang it.
Their roll continued when their third song, “Hard Times” gave them their proper first hit when popular blues singer Charles Brown took the song to #7 on the R&B charts. The pair were suddenly in demand when they got the call to visit a rehearsal with bandleader Johnny Otis at his house.
“We had worked with Johnny Otis on a couple of sessions with Little Esther and Little Willie doing duets with Little Esther, and so on,” Stoller recalled to The Blue Railroad. “ And [Otis] called me and said, “Are you familiar with Willie Mae Thornton?” I said, “No, I’m not.” He said, “Well I need some songs… Come over and listen to her and write some songs,” and that’s the way that happened. We went over and heard her and said, “Whoa!””
Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton was born in Alabama in 1926, the youngest of six siblings, and, along with her mother who sang in the choir, was soon singing in the Baptist church where her father was a minister. As a young girl Thornton’s mother became sick and she often had to miss school to take care of her. But it was during these difficult times that music became important to the young singer, teaching herself to play harmonica by watching her older brother play.
In 1939, Thornton was just 13 when her mother died of tuberculosis and she had to leave the school she had barely attended to find a job. 
She ended up cleaning spittoons in a local tavern. The story goes that the tavern’s singer got so drunk one night he couldn’t perform. Thornton grabbed the opportunity, convincing the owner to let her sing instead thus beginning her career as a blues singer.
A year later Thornton was working on a garbage truck when singer and entertainer Diamond Teeth Mary (the half-sister of one of Thornton’s main influences, Bessie Smith) heard the 14-year-old singing as she passed by on the truck and was so impressed she ran after her to tell her of an upcoming audition to win a spot on Sammy Green’s Hot Harlem Revue. Thornton was soon traveling with the revue all over the South, singing, dancing as well as playing harmonica and drums.
By 1948 Thornton had left the Revue and was living in Houston, Texas working as a nightclub singer with Louis Jordan’s band. A trip to play the Apollo in New York had earned her the nickname “Big Mama” due to her booming voice and size (Thornton was by now six feet tall) and it stuck.
It wasn’t long before Thornton was offered a contract with Peacock Records and had recorded a couple of singles but none had become hits. It was during this time too that she first worked with bandleader Johnny Otis and it was on this fateful day in 1952 that Otis was working with the now 25 year old trying to work up some new material that hopefully would finally give her a long deserved hit.
When Leiber and Stoller met her they were so inspired the song came almost straight away. “Big Mama got up and she just blew everybody away. She was just such a great blues singer,” Leiber told WGPH. “We looked at each other and decided to take off immediately, and we jumped in Mike’s car and headed for his house. And I’d say about, maybe half way to his house I’d already gotten about 50 percent of the lyrics to the song. And we landed, and Mike went to the piano, and I started yelling, you ain’t nothing but a hound dog, and it all came together in about eight or ten minutes.”
The songwriting duo returned to Otis’ house with the newly written song in hand and gave it to Thornton to sing, who, after some persuasion from Otis, agreed to record it although her first instinct was to croon it like a ballad.
“On the way to the studio the following day, we said, “You know, she oughta growl it,” they told Tablet Magazine. “We mentioned it, and she 
said, “Don’t be telling me how to sing blues, white boy.” However, of course, it stuck in her head, and boom! It was a fabulous performance. She was really sensational.” The record also turned out to be Leiber and Stoller’s first as producers, with Otis playing drums. Only two takes were recorded. “The first take was incredible,” Stoller stated to The Independent. “The second was even better.” And that was the version that was eventually released.
Although the song was recorded in August, 1952, the single wasn’t released until February 1953. Thornton didn’t even realize the song had come out until she heard it one day on the radio while 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 later recalled. “So that evening I sang it on the show, and everybody went for it. “Hound Dog” just took off like a jet.”
The single made its debut on the Billboard R&B charts on March 28, 1952 and eventually made its way to the top spot, spending seven weeks at #1. It quickly became the biggest selling single in Peacock Record’s history and not only spawned numerous cover versions (Little Esther got there first, her version coming out less than a month after Thornton’s) but also a number of answer songs, the first being Rufus Thomas’ single “Bear Cat” released on Sun Records. Ironically Peacock Records later successfully sued Sun for copyright infringement and Sun’s founder Sam Phillips, in order to pay off his debts, was forced to sell Elvis Presley’s record contract to RCA, where Elvis of course later had a huge hit with “Hound Dog.”
The song had such an impact that the covers, and even some rip-offs, kept coming in the years after but the first real pop version came in 1955 courtesy of Las Vegas lounge act Freddie Bell and the Bellboys. Teen Records founder Bernie Lowe realized the song could have mainstream appeal with a lighter touch and asked the band to rewrite some of the racier lyrics. The innuendoes in the line “You can wag your tail but I ain’t gonna feed you no more” became the far more neutral “you ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine” and “snooping around my door” became “crying all the time.” The song was also given a trendy rock ‘n’ roll beat.
The record was the first release for Teen Records and although not a nationwide hit, proved successful in Philadelphia and was a radio hit on the East Coast of the US. The single was also popular enough to earn the group an appearance in the 1956 rock ‘n’ roll film Rock Around The Clock.
It was the Freddie Bell and the Bellboys’ version of the song that inspired Elvis Presley’s iconic version. Elvis first heard the group performing it when he and his band went to see Bell’s popular show at the Sands Casino in Las Vegas in 1956. He loved their performance of the song so much he immediately added it to his live shows and at once it went down a storm with his audiences. Scotty Moore recalled in his autobiography, That’s Alright: “He’d start out, ‘You ain’t nothin’ but a Hound Dog,’ and they’d just go to pieces. They’d always react the same way. There’d be a riot every time.”
Before recording the song, Presley decided to test it on a wider television audience by performing it during his second appearance on the Milton Berle Show, and by this point Presley had brought back some of the more bluesy elements of Big Mama’s original (Elvis was apparently already familiar with Thornton’s version), slowing down the song halfway throughout as well as bringing his own unique style to the song.
This performance was also notable for the controversy that came in its wake, with Presley’s suggestive hip gyrations (which now seem completely tame) proving shockingly sexual to some and causing outrage in the media (the New York Herald Tribune slammed his performance by calling him “unspeakably untalented and vulgar.”) Of course, young rock ‘n’ roll loving teens loved his energetic performance and the controversy only served to make Presley – now nicknamed Elvis the Pelvis – even more popular.
Just a few weeks later Presley returned to TV screens on the Steve Allen Show and this time was somehow persuaded to perform “Hound Dog” again but this time in a super family friendly comedic version, dressed up in a tuxedo and singing the song to a real hound dog (also smartly dressed in a small top hat).
The very next day, July 2 1956, Presley went into the studio and, although he had not planned to ever record “Hound Dog” (he also recorded “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Any Way You Want Me” the same day), the producer that RCA had assigned, Steve Sholes, insisted he build on the momentum from his TV performances of the song and get the track on vinyl.
Despite his initial reluctance Presley – co-producing for the first time – knew exactly how he wanted the song to sound on record, keeping it upbeat and more raucous, as well as losing the slower bluesy part heard in his live show. Driving the band through 31 takes, Presley took Steve Bell’s poppy parody of Thornton’s blues tune, and gave it a rock ‘n’ roll menace, aided by Scotty Moore’s fierce guitar. He chose take 28 from the session and this was the version unleashed onto the world with “Don’t Be Cruel” just over a week later on July 13, 1956.
Not surprisingly the single was an immediate smash and when the newly married Stoller returned from his honeymoon cruise he was met by Leiber at the boat who excitedly told him that “Hound Dog” was a huge hit. A confused Stoller thought he meant Thornton’s record, “No,” Leiber replied, “Some white guy named Elvis Presley.”
At first the songwriting duo weren’t impressed. “It’s a woman’s song and she’s singing about a freeloader, a gigolo. And Elvis is singing to a dog,” Stoller told Reuters. “After it sold seven or eight million the first week, we began to see some merit in it.”
Presley’s version got a further boost when he was invited on the hugely popular Ed Sullivan Show for three appearances and each time he sang “Hound Dog” (although for his third and final appearance, due to Presley’s scandalous hips, he was filmed above the waist).
Elvis’ version went on to sell over 10 million copies worldwide (with five million sold in the US) and spent an incredible 11 weeks at #1 – a record not broken until Boyz II Men achieved 14 weeks at the top with their hit “End Of The Road” in 1992.
Presley’s “Hound Dog” has had many detractors over the years including Elvis himself who considered it his most silly song, but its impact and influence has been immense shown by the huge amount of cover versions it has garnered (more than 250 times in fact) from fellow rock ‘n’ rollers such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard to later rock legends such as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison and John Lennon (Paul McCartney and Lennon’s early band the Quarrymen also regularly performed the song.)
In the wake of Elvis’ success with “Hound Dog” Big Mama Thornton’s original was also re-released but even then she saw little money from it. “Didn’t get no money from them at all,” she told Rolling Stone in 1984. “Everybody livin’ in a house but me. I’m just livin’.”
Although interest in Thornton began to fade after “Hound Dog” she continued to record and perform and when Janis Joplin famously 
covered Thornton’s “Ball ‘n’ Chain” at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 it helped to revive her career, leading to the release of her most successful album Stronger Than Dirt in 1969. “I gave her the right and the permission to make “Ball ‘n’ Chain,” ” Thornton sadly told an interviewer after Joplin’s death. “She always was my idol before she passed away… and I thank her for helping me.”
Thornton herself died of a heart attack in 1984 aged just 57 years old, the result of years of alcohol abuse. In the last years of her life her illness had caused her to lose 255 pounds and with her skinny frame was no longer recognizable as the tall, brassy Big Mama of old but she still had that amazing voice right until the end.
Leiber and Stoller too hardly made any money from the almost two million copies sold of Thornton’s original version of “Hound Dog” but the cash that came from the Elvis release certainly made up for it. The song’s success led to them writing many hits for Elvis such as “Jailhouse Rock,” “Trouble,” “Loving You,” and “King Creole,” among others, and numerous hits for other artists such as The Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby,” “Yakety Yak” for The Coasters, and “Stand By Me” written with Ben E. King, to name but a few.
Presley’s version of “Hound Dog” though is not just one of his most famous songs but one of the best selling singles of all time. His iconic take on the song became one of the most important hits of the rock ‘n’ roll revolution, something that was recognized when it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1988 (Thornton’s version was only inducted in 2013).
But without Big Mama Thornton, who inspired and helped shape the song, “Hound Dog” would not exist in the first place and Thornton certainly deserves recognition for the important role she played. Which is why it’s puzzling that this talented and influential lady hasn’t been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame yet. She certainly deserves to be. We’re sure Elvis, Janis and many others would agree.
