Hound Dog, before Elvis

In the summer of 1952, Willie Mae Thornton is twenty-six and has been singing for years. Born in Alabama, a preacher's daughter, she has done it all: played drums and harmonica and sung in traveling shows. She is tall and strong, with a voice that fills a room without a microphone, and everyone knows her as Big Mama.

In Los Angeles, bandleader Johnny Otis asks two young songwriters to write her a song. They are Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, two nineteen-year-old white kids obsessed with rhythm and blues. After hearing her rehearse, they write Hound Dog in a matter of minutes. It is a song made for her: a woman throwing out a lazy man who lives off her.

In August 1952 she records it in a Los Angeles studio with Otis's band. The guitar scratches, the drums drag, and Thornton doesn't so much sing the song as chew it, growl it, laugh at it. The record comes out in the spring of 1953 on Peacock Records, Don Robey's label in Houston, and goes to number one on the rhythm and blues charts, where it stays for seven weeks.

It is such a hit that imitations soon follow. In Memphis, Sun Records releases an answer song, Bear Cat, sung by Rufus Thomas. Robey sues them for plagiarism and wins. The song is already a business, and the fight is over who owns it.

The one who earns least is the woman who made it famous. Years later, Thornton would say that all she ever saw for Hound Dog was a single check for 500 dollars.

In 1956 Elvis Presley hears it in Las Vegas, in a version by a white group, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, who had changed the lyrics: it is no longer about a lazy man but about a hunting dog. Elvis records it that summer and sells millions of copies. From then on, for almost everyone, Hound Dog is an Elvis song.

History will repeat itself. In the late 1960s another Thornton song, Ball and Chain, becomes famous in the voice of Janis Joplin. Big Mama Thornton dies in Los Angeles in 1984, with little recognition and even less money.