Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton: “Hound Dog” (1952)
Big Mama Thornton was a blues/R&B singer and professional BAMF.
This is what I learned about her from my music history professor:
She left home at the age of 14 to try to get gigs singing in clubs & vaudeville acts. She taught herself how to play some instruments, like drums and harmonica. Nobody dared mess with her due to her imposing stature (obviously at least six feet tall!) Songwriters Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller (who wrote many of the early rock’n’roll songs, such as “Yakety-Yak” for the Coasters, “Stand By Me” for Ben E. King, and “Under the Boardwalk” for the Drifters) wrote “Hound Dog” for her after seeing her perform. It was #1 on the Billboard Rhythm & Blues charts before Elvis’ version made #1 on the Rock’n’Roll charts. According to my instructor, during the 50s Rhythm & Blues and Rock’n’Roll were pretty similar and shared influences before later branching off into R&B and Rock, and the nomenclature at the time was mainly to segregate the black artists from the white, at least on paper/radio stations/record labels, even though there was a lot of crossover happening between performers as well as audiences. (My professor says he’ll tell us later about his thoughts on how music contributed to desegregation in general.)
Although the recording of “Hound Dog” brought Big Mama fame, she didn’t see a lot of profit, and at least as my professor told us, she later died in poverty. Record companies would typically offer the singer two options: take a payment up front and give up the rights to the song, or keep the rights to the song and get paid a fraction of a cent for each record sale. A large payment up front was tempting to many musicians who were usually broke, and the record companies would frame the proposition in terms of: “at least you’ll get paid something because what if the record doesn’t sell?” But when the record would go and sell a hundred thousand copies, the singers rarely saw royalties.
