Welcome to episode fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Hound Dog" by Big Mama Thornton. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.



Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (along with one, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", that got cut out of the eventual episode)

I used three main resources for this podcast.

Big Mama Thornton: Her Life and Music by Michael Spörke  is the only biography of Thornton. It's very well researched, but suffers somewhat from English not being its author's first language.

Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, is an invaluable book on the most important songwriting team of their generation.

And Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story by George Lipsitz is the definitive biography of Otis.

This collection has most of Big Mama Thornton's fifties recordings on it.

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Transcript

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 I can, but I apologise if I mess up, and nothing I say here should be taken as more accurate or authoritative than the words of the 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 fit neatly 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 which back in the 1940s and 1950s weren't, quite. Jewish people, for example, were still legally discriminated against in a lot of places (unlike now, when 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 Mae Thornton was big in every sense -- she weighed three hundred and fifty pounds, or about twenty-five 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 fourteen, thanks to her mentor, a singer called "Diamond Teeth Mary".

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