Chart position: #1 R&B (for 7 weeks)
Category: R&B
Writers: Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Johnny Otis (Otis's name later removed)
Label and number: Peacock 1612, Houston, Texas
Flipside: "Night Mare"
When and where recorded: August 13, 1952, in Los Angeles
When released: Late February 1953
Why Important: It was the earliest release of this influential song,
and it established Leiber and Stoller as important songwriters.
Influenced: Rufus Thomas's "Bear Cat" (#3 R&B, Sun Records' first
hit), Roy Brown's "Mr. Hound Dog's in Town" and scores of other R&B answer
records. It led eventually to Elvis Presley's version of the song, which became
one of the biggest rock 'n' roll hits of the '50s.
Important cover versions: Little Esther, Tommy Duncan, Eddie Hazelwood
Important remakes: Freddy Bell and His Bell Boys (1955), Elvis Presley
(#1 Pop, 1956), Homer and Jethro ("Houn' Dawg"), Lalo Guerrero ("Pound Dog")
The story behind the record: "Hound Dog" is inextricably linked to the
rise of Elvis Presley as a world phenomenon in 1956, when the song was half
of a two-sided hit record (along with "Don't Be Cruel") that stayed at the very
top of the pop charts from August to November-an incredible eleven weeks in
all. "Hound Dog" elicited the mass media's patronizing antagonism toward both
Elvis and rock 'n' roll in the early days, perhaps for good reason: as sung
by a man, "Hound Dog" didn't make any sense.
That's because two Jewish teenagers had written it four years earlier for a black, three-hundred-pound lesbian. "[Jerry] Leiber and [Mike] Stoller were a couple of kids then and they had this song written on the back of a brown paper bag," blues shouter Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton told British writer Bill Millar a few years before her death. "I started to sing the words and put in some of my own, all that talkin' and hollerin'-that's my own."
Willie Mae Thornton was from Montgomery, Alabama (born December 11, 1926), and had risen to prominence as a singer, drummer, harmonica player and comic on the chitlin circuit. In 1951 she signed with a Houston gangster named Don Robey, a light-skinned Jewish-Negro who owned a nightclub, a booking agency and Peacock Records. Though a violent man who surrounded himself with bodyguards, Robey reportedly kept on Big Mama's good side because he had a healthy respect for her.
And no wonder. As Mike Stoller described Big Mama, "I don't know what she weighed, but it appeared to us that she was close to three hundred pounds. Even in rehearsal she'd fool around, pick up one of those old microphones with a heavy, steel base with one hand and turn it upside down with the base in the air and sing like that. She was a powerful, powerful woman. She had a few scars, looked like knife scars on her face, and she had a very beautiful smile. But most of the time she looked pretty salty."
After a couple of her records-with titles like "All Fed Up" and "Cotton Pickin' Blues"-went nowhere, Robey sent Big Mama to Los Angeles to work with his A&R man, bandleader Johnny Otis, who had already produced a string of R&B hits, including Little Esther's "Double Crossin' Blues." Otis (real name Veliotes) was a Greek drummer with black pretensions, who in fact had married a black woman and lived in the black milieu. In Los Angeles he was considered one of the more slippery operators in what was regarded as a hustler's business. He served as a talent scout, bandleader, promoter and music arranger for several independent record companies, often at the same time. When Robey asked him to produce Willie Mae's next record, Otis got together his usual band, including guitarist Carl "Pete" Lewis, drummer Leard "Kansas City" Bell and pianist Devonia "Lady Dee" Williams. Casting around for song ideas, he called up the two kids who had been pestering him to record their music.
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were East Coast transplants from Baltimore and New York, respectively. They met in Los Angeles around 1950. "I was writing lyrics for eight-and twelve-bar blues," Leiber said. "I was looking for a partner who could write music, and somebody put me in touch with Mike, who was a student at L.A. City College." The two sold their first songs to a local blues label, Modern Records: "That's What the Good Book Says" (by the Robins) and "Real Ugly Woman" (by Jimmy Witherspoon).
"We did some work with Johnny Otis here in L.A.," Stoller recalled. "We were eighteen, nineteen years old at the time, we'd written some songs for Little Esther and Mel Walker [singers in Otis's band], and Johnny asked us to come over to his house where he had converted his garage to a rehearsal room. He said, `I've got this singer, I've got to produce some sides with her, Willie Mae Thornton: We went over, caught the rehearsal."
After listening to her sing awhile, the young men went back to Leiber's house. "I started playing [piano] and Jerry started shouting. I think we wrote 'Hound Dog' in about ten minutes, got back in my '37 Plymouth and drove back to Johnny's and we sang it to her. She said, 'Aw right, I can do that.' "
Johnny Otis said recently that he used his own songwriting skills to polish the material, which essentially was an old-time, twelve-bar blues number about a woman trying to get rid of a lazy man who had lost his sexual usefulness. "They had put some stuff in there that black people would have found offensive. They had lyrics about knives and fighting and scars, all negative stereotypes. I took out a line and put in one of my own that went, 'You ain't lookin' for a woman, you just lookin' for a home.' " Even after Otis's polish, "Hound Dog" retained much of its sexual imagery: "You can wag your tail, but I ain't gon' feed you no more."
"We went to the studio [on Washington Boulevard, in southwest Los Angeles] about two days later," said Stoller. "In the rehearsal Johnny had been playing drums and he'd tuned the drums in a particular way that had a wonderful kind of tom-tom sound. When we got to the studio we did two takes and started rehearsing and it wasn't happening, it wasn't the same thing. Johnny had this wonderful drummer, Leard Bell. We said, 'Look, Johnny, you gotta get out there and play or it's not gonna happen. Johnny said, 'Who's gonna produce?'Jerry said, 'Well produce. Jerry sat in the booth, I stayed on the floor, Johnny got on his drums and tuned his drums back. Jerry also said to Big Mama, 'Now I want you to growl.' She said, 'Don't be tellin' me how to sing!' But she tried it and it worked. We got it in two takes."
"Hound Dog" was the first song recorded in an eight-song session that smoggy August day. Otis's full band was in the studio, but "Hound Dog" relied mostly on the electric guitar work of Pete Lewis, an eccentric Louisiana bluesman who played in the style of T-Bone Walker. "Hound Dog" was in essence a duet between Lewis and Thornton, with Otis and his Puerto Rican bass player Mario Delgarde adding a funky, jazz-based rhythm.
When Peacock Records released the record six months later, the band was credited to Otis's drummer "Kansas City Bill" (sic) even though Bell didn't play on it. Otis couldn't use his own name because he had contractual obligations elsewhere, and properly spelling Bell's last name might have let the hound out of the bag. However, Otis did include his own name with Leiber's and Stoller's as one of the songwriters, a minor detail soon to create a lengthy court battle and plenty of enmity. "Hound Dog" would produce more than its share of dogfights.
"When it was first released Johnny was credited as a composer, but we took the matter to court and won," Stoller told Bill Millar. "He had asked us for a third of our end of the song which we agreed to on a certain basis, but the basis was not complied with. We were all to copublish the song . . . We formed a firm to publish the song and then unilaterally he signed the song to Don Robey's firm and indicated to Don that he had the right to sign for us, which was all complete nonsense. Johnny, who I have really fond memories of, was often making three deals at once."
Otis recalled that Leiber and Stoller were able to disaffirm their contract because they were both minors. He remains bitter. "Had I gotten my rightful share, I could've sent my kids to college, as I'm sure they sent their kids to college. It was a legal swindle and I got beat out of it. It was a tremendously big song."
To complicate matters, Otis was under exclusive contract to Syd Nathan at King/Federal Records in Cincinnati (which is why his band wasn't listed on the record) as both an artist and a songwriter. Immediately Nathan sued Robey's publishing company for fifty percent of its publishing royalty. To cash in on the song immediately, Nathan recorded a cover version of "Hound Dog" by Otis's former lead singer, Little Esther Phillips. As it turned out, however, her version was not a hit, and Nathan himself was eventually cut out of any "Hound Dog" royalties when Johnny Otis's name was removed from the song.
"Hound Dog" collared the number one spot on the R&B charts, sold well over half a million copies and became one of the top-selling black records of 1953. One of the disk jockeys playing it was Rufus Thomas at WDIA in Memphis. Thomas wrote a humorous answer song which he called "Bear Cat" -a "bear" in black parlance was an aggressive or ugly woman, and the word had been showing up in blues songs since as early as 1938. Thomas recorded "Bear Cat" in Sam Phillips's studio on Union Avenue where Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88" had been cut two years earlier. When Phillips released "Bear Cat" on his new Sun Records, it became the label's first hit (number three R&B).
As Stoller remembered it, "A lawsuit was either instituted or threatened by Don Robey, who at that time was 'Hound Dog''s publisher. There was a practice in those days that was quite common, doing what was called an answer record, and `Bear Cat' was an answer record. The legality of copyright ownership had not been tested until that time; that was the first case involving copyright ownership [of `Hound Dog']." Sam Phillips buried the bone of contention by giving Robey two cents on every copy of the record sold. As for Rufus Thomas, he had a major pop hit ten years later with "Walkin' the Dog."
Most cover records of "Hound Dog" were made by country artists like Betsy Gay, Tommy Duncan (former lead singer of Bob Wills' Texas Playboys), Jack Turner and Billy Starr.
The following story is a little dog-eared by now, but we'll recount it anyway. In early 1955 "Hound Dog" was recorded as a spoof for Teen Records by a Vegas lounge act from Chicago called Freddy Bell and the Bell Boys, who loosely fashioned themselves after Bill Haley and His Comets. In April 1956, while Elvis Presley was flopping at his abortive two-week stand at the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, he and his band went several times to a little club where the Bell Boys were performing and caught their act. Elvis especially liked their treatment of "Hound Dog," complete with jackhammer drumming, and perhaps he didn't quite realize that they were joking with Big Mama's blues. In any event, when he left Vegas and went into a New York City recording studio a couple of months later, on July 2, he recorded "Hound Dog," telling his sidemen, "Let's do it the way them boys did it." And the rest is . . . well, you know. Presley's version even topped the R&B charts for six weeks, one more week than Big Mama's had three years earlier-and he spent the next several years living down the picture sleeve photo, taken from his appearance on Steve Allen's TV show, of him crooning the song to a basset hound. Mercury Records hurriedly signed Freddy Bell and rushed his Bell Boys into the studio to record their second version of "Hound Dog," in hopes of sinking their teeth into Presley's shirttails, but the public treated the single like a pariah dog. The same thing happened to Big Mama's original version when Peacock reissued it. In 1956, for all intents and purposes, there was only one "Hound Dog."
Big Mama had no other hits. She settled in Los Angeles and left show business until the late '60s, when one of her fans, Janis Joplin, rediscovered her. Thornton recorded several albums, redid "Hound Dog" and introduced a new song called "Ball and Chain," which Joplin covered on a million-selling album. But when cancer claimed Big Mama Thornton on July 25,1984, she was bone-skinny and dog-tired and living in a rundown house in south Los Angeles.