A Hound Dog Tale: Big Mama, Elvis, and the Song That Changed Everything

Music historian Wynne (Something in the Water) scrupulously documents how Elvis’s 1956 hit song “Hound Dog” helped catapult rock ’n’ roll “into the American cultural mainstream.” Written for and performed by “blues belter” Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thorton in 1953, the song was covered by multiple artists before Elvis saw Freddie Bell and the Bellboys perform a sanitized and comedic rendition in Las Vegas in 1956. Soon, Elvis was singing “Hound Dog” at live performances in a “dynamic, sexually suggestive” style that transformed the “Las Vegas novelty number into something much more raw and dangerous.” According to Wynne, Elvis’s version of the tune embodied “a new youth culture emerging in America” that scandalized swaths of the country with its sexual undertones and “Black” slang. Profiled are a constellation of figures connected to the song’s history, including songwriters Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber, producer and band leader Johnny Otis, and radio personality Rufus Thomas, who performed a “Hound Dog” answer song. Throughout, Wynne engages with rich and complex debates about the song’s racial resonances and questions of appropriation (it was written by Jewish songwriters who idolized Black culture and first performed by Black singer Thorton, and while Elvis modeled his version after a white performer’s, he’d likely heard Thornton’s at some point before). Exhaustively researched and energetically written, this is a colorful study of rock’s complicated beginnings. (Feb.)