29 July 2008

Profile of Big Mama Thornton

Singer, drummer, harmonica player emerged as R&B leader

Big Mama Thornton recorded the original version of “Hound Dog.”

(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)

The daughter of a Baptist minister, Big Mama Thornton began her career as a singer, drummer, harmonica player, and comic on the black vaudeville circuit. Her imposing physique and sometimes malevolent personality helped to ensure her survival in the rough-and-tumble world of con artists and gangsters.

In the early 1950s Thornton arrived in Los Angeles and began working with Johnny Otis, a Greek American who was a major force in the R&B scene. Looking for material for Big Mama to record, Otis consulted two white college kids who had been pestering him to use some of their songs. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller composed a song that they felt suited her style: “Hound Dog.” The combination of Leiber and Stoller’s humorous country-tinged lyric, Johnny Otis’s drumming, and Thornton’s powerful, raspy singing produced one of the top-selling R&B records of 1953.

Most people today know “Hound Dog” through Elvis Presley’s version of the song. If you are familiar only with Presley’s version, the original recording may come as a revelation. From the very first phrase Thornton lays claim to the song. Her deep, commanding voice, reprimanding a ne’er-do-well lover, projects a stark image of female power rarely expressed in popular music of the 1950s. The lyrical bluntness is reinforced by the musical accompaniment, which includes a bluesy Delta- style electric guitar, a simple drum part played mainly on the tom-toms, and hand clapping. The tempo is relaxed, and the performance energetic but loose. The song’s basic form is a 12-bar blues, but the band adds a few extra beats here and there in response to Thornton’s phrasing, another feature that links this urban recording to the country blues. The final touch, with the all-male band howling and barking in response to Big Mama’s commands, reinforces the record’s humor and its informality.

[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]