On the true blues origins of this rock & roll classic written for Big Mama Thornton
“Hound Dog,” written by the legendary songwriting duo of Leiber & Stoller, is one of the most famous records in the history of rock and roll as recorded by Elvis Presley. Yet it was not written to be rock & roll, nor intended for Elvis.
As the songwriters related themselves during a 1992 interview for this magazine, it was written before rock & roll mattered; it was a blues, the genre that they loved the most, and which brought them together. It was written not for Elvis, but for an artist they both loved, a giant in the blues world, Big Mama Thornton. The true story of the song, like the story of the songwriters’ momentous first meeting, has rarely been told accurately, as certain significant nuances got confused.
The oft-told story was that Leiber & Stoller met each other when they were teens, which is true, and in Los Angeles, also true. Both were born into Jewish families; Leiber in Baltimore, 1933, and Stoller that same year in Long Island. They met when they were 16, after both moved with their families to Los Angeles. Leiber was attending Fairfax High when they met, and Stoller had already graduated from Belmont High and started college at L.A. City College. The key part of their origin tale that is often confused was their first response to each other, in which Leiber, who wrote lyrics in need of music, met the piano-playing Stoller. According to many sources, Stoller informed Leiber that he should look elsewhere for a collaborator because, as he was quoted, “I don’t like songs.” That this iconic songwriter started his legendary life of great songwriting by proclaiming a dislike of songs always seemed ironic at the least. But it wasn’t accurate.
As they explained, that is not what Mike said. He did like songs. What he meant was that he didn’t like pop songs. He was a serious jazz lover and a blues enthusiast. He did love jazz and blues songs, a lot, and aspired to write them. “I was a snob,” Mike said. “I was a big Bebop fan. So I thought [Leiber] would, somehow, be writing songs that I just wouldn’t care for. That I’d consider commercial, which was a terrible word among jazz musicians. Not that I was a jazz musician. But I wanted to be.” But both of them loved the blues. And that is where their legendary collaboration, in which they became among the first architects of rock & roll.
It was a bond they forged when Mike looked over Jerry’s notebook of lyrics, and discovered, to his delight, that they were all written in the old blues form; the first line of a verse repeated twice, then was followed by a rhyming punch-line, as in “Hound Dog.” You ain’t nothing but a hound dog/Been snoopin’ ’round the door You ain’t nothing but a hound dog/Been snoopin’ ’round my door You can wag your tail but I ain’t gonna feed you no more
From “Hound Dog” by Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller
Once Leiber & Stoller recognized their shared passion for blues, they started writing songs together, and were good at it. Actually great. And they never stopped. Stoller, then and today, was a great pianist, so it was a reasonable assumption that he wrote the music for “Hound Dog” on piano. But he did not. As he explains in the following discussion, he didn’t write it on an instrument at all. He wrote by banging on his car, a grey-green Plymouth. More on that to follow.
How this song was pitched, received and recorded by Big Mama, who had a hit with it on what was known then as “race radio,” which meant black music, is all herein. As is their response to Elvis’ rendition of the song, which had the wrong groove, and wrong lyrics, something which irked the songwriters forever.
AMERICAN SONGWRITER: Much of the history of “Hound Dog” has been distorted, so let’s set the record straight. It’s true you wrote it after you heard Big Mama Thornton sing?MIKE STOLLER: Inbetween seeing her sing and coming back to a rehearsal at Johnny Otis’ house.Did you write it on piano?
STOLLER: No. I wrote it on my old car. [Laughs]
LEIBER: A green Plymouth.
STOLLER: It was actually gray. It was a gray 1937 Plymouth. [Pause] Actually, it was greenish gray, you’re right.
And that main line, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” just came to you?
LEIBER: Yeah, it did. And I felt “you ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog” was a dummy lyric. I was not happy. I wanted something that was a lot more insinuating. I wanted something that was sexy and insinuating. And I told Mike I didn’t like it, we were driving, and he said, “I like it, man.” The two of us walked in [Mike’s] house, and into this sort of a den, where this upright piano was. And I was singing. I started singing it in the car on the way over: “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, quite snoopin’ round my door.” And I didn’t have all the lyrics. And we walked into Mike’s house, into the den, and he walked over – and I will never forget it, the moment is indelibly etched on my memory – he walked over to the piano, and he had a cigarette in his mouth, and the smoke was curling up into his eye, and he kept it there and he was playing, and he was grooving with the rhythm, and he was grooving, grooving, and we locked into one place. Lyrical content, syllabically, locked in to the rhythm of the piano. And we knew we had it. We wrote it in about twelve minutes. And I will never forget it. He had the smoke from this cigarette curling up into his left eye, and I was watching him. And he was singing, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” and I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah – that’s it.”STOLLER: And we drove back to the rehearsal [of Big Mama]. Because we had been invited. We had worked with Johnny Otis on a couple of sessions with Little Esther and Little Willie doing duets with Little Esther, and so on. And [Johnny Otis] called me and said, “Are you familiar with Willie Mae Thornton?” I said, “No, I’m not.” He said, “Well, I need some songs.” The procedure, before that, was that we’d get a call from Ralph Bass, who was the head of Federal Records, a division of King. He would call and say, “We’re cutting Little Esther tomorrow. 2:00 to 5:00 at Radio Recorders. Bring some songs.” And we would write two or three songs. And sometimes during the session, during which we’d try to get some of our ideas done, even though we were just newcomers in that field, we’d go out in the hall and write another one. So Johnny called and said, “Come over and listen to her and write some songs,” and that’s the way that happened. We went over and heard her and said, “Whoa!” We ran over to my house in my car, wrote the song, came back.LEIBER: I just remembered – we came back to the rehearsal, and I had this sheet of paper. And we walked in. And I think I said, “We got it.” And Big Mama walked over and she grabbed the sheet out of my hand and she said, “Let me see this.” I looked at her and I looked at the sheet. And I saw that the sheet was upside-down. And she was just staring at it, looking at it, as if she could read it, right? She said, “What does it say?” I said, “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog, quit snooping round my door.” She said, “Oh, that’s pretty.” She took the sheet back and she started singing [slowly and melodically], “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog…” She’s singing a ballad. She’s crooning a ballad. And I said, “Mama, it don’t go like that.”
Big Mama Thornton was a native of Montgomery, Alabama, who came of age on the R&B circuit in the 1940s after starting her professional career in 1941 at the age of 14. In 1951, she signed her first record contract with Peacock Records and was soon paired with another of its artists, bandleader Johnny Otis, who brought Thornton out to join his band in California. It was there, in late 1952, that Otis asked two young songwriters on the Los Angeles music scene if they would write something especially for Thornton. Those songwriters were Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, who would go on to have an enormous impact on R&B and early rock and roll through their work with groups like the Coasters and the Drifters. But hits like “Yakkity Yak,” “Charlie Brown,” “Stand By Me,” “Jailhouse Rock” and “Love Potion No. 9″ were still ahead of Lieber and Stoller when they did what Otis asked and came back to him with a 12-bar country blues tune called “Hound Dog.”
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On this day in 1952, Big Mama Thornton and the Johnny Otis Band recorded “Hound Dog” and turned it into a smash hit on the R&B charts, where it stayed at #1 for seven weeks. It wasn’t Thornton’s recording, however, that inspired Elvis to record “Hound Dog” three years later. Presley’s inspiration came from a rewrite by a singer named Freddie Bell, who changed the original lyrics to include the now-familiar “Cryin’ all the time” and “You ain’t never caught a rabbit.” During his first Las Vegas engagement in the spring of 1956, Elvis Presley heard Freddie Bell and the Bellboys performing the reworked “Hound Dog” and added it to his repertoire almost immediately.
Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” (1956) is one of the biggest and most instantly recognizable pop songs in history. It’s a song so closely associated with the King of Rock and Roll, in fact, that many may mistakenly assume that it was a Presley original. In fact, the story of the song that gave Elvis his longest-running #1 hit (11 weeks) in the summer of 1956 began four years earlier, when “Hound Dog” was recorded for the very first time by the rhythm-and-blues singer Ellie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton in Los Angeles, California.
Procedure:
1. Play a video of Big Mama Thornton performing “Hound Dog.” Ask students for any words or phrases they would use to describe Thornton’s sound. Next, play an audio clip of “(How Much is that) Doggy in the Window?,” a Pop song recorded by Patti Page in 1953, the same year Thornton released “Hound Dog.” Ask students to speculate: how might the general audience for Pop music have responded to Thornton’s sound? [Students might find the music “raw” or “gritty,” something that would unsettle the general Pop audience.]
2. Display s of Billboard’s R&B and Pop charts from May 1953. Explain that in the 1950s, the R&B chart was associated primarily with black audiences, and, in turn, the Pop chart was associated with mostly white audiences. Ask students:
[Note: Of the Top 10 Pop artists listed, only Nat “King” Cole is an African American. The other nine artists on the Pop chart are white.]
3. Thornton’s recording was released at a time when many public institutions in the country were segregated. Segregation had legally existed since Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. Ask students:
4. Play the video clip of Elvis Presley performing “Hound Dog” in 1956. Ask students: what are some differences you notice between Elvis and Thornton as performers? [Students may notice their differences in gender, race, physical movements, etc.]
5. Display s from the 1956 Billboard R&B, Country, and Pop charts, and have students locate “Hound Dog” on each chart. Ask students:
While Thornton’s recording had been released three years earlier, Elvis’s version became the most commercially successful.
6. Explain that the class will now consider one specific example of how desegregation impacted life in 1950s America. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools are unconstitutional. Such institutions were thus required to desegregate, a process that was often tense in communities accustomed to the “separate but equal” lifestyle born of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. In some cases, National Guardsmen were called in to help escort African-American students into school buildings. Ask students if they understand what “separate but equal” meant to life in the American South, and why Brown v. Board of Education disrupted that?
7. Break students up into small groups and hand out to each group the School Desegregation Worksheet. The worksheet contains two photographs from 1956 of a high school in Tennessee undergoing desegregation. Groups should investigate both photos and discuss the following questions:
8. Continuing on the worksheet, groups should select two individuals from each photo for whom the group will creating “thought bubbles.” Use the first-person perspective, with each thought bubble describing an individual’s internal feelings or reactions to the events that are transpiring on the school’s campus. When finished, invite volunteers from each group to present their thought bubbles to the class.
9. Remind students that the Brown v. Board of Education ruling was decided in 1954, between Thornton’s release of “Hound Dog” in 1953 and Elvis’s recording of the same song in 1956. Have students write a journal entry answering the following prompt:
In the fall of 1956 Elvis’s recording of “Hound Dog” topped the American Pop charts. At the same time, formerly all-white schools in some parts of the country were struggling with the process of integration. Why might a person accept racial mixing in popular culture, such as in music, but not accept racial mixing in cultural institutions, such as public schools? What does this say about the particularities and possibilities of racial mixing in music culture? How might music culture thus help lead the way towards integration in other areas of American life?