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The Interracial Origins of 'Hound Dog': Big Mama Thornton and Elvis Presley, Schemes and Mind Maps of Music

Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU)Music

The racial mixing in music culture during the 1950s through the story of 'Hound Dog', a song recorded by Big Mama Thornton, an African-American Rhythm and Blues singer, and later by Elvis Presley, a white singer. how the recording of 'Hound Dog' by these artists, despite the racial segregation of the time, demonstrated the ability of musicians to challenge established ideas about race relations. Thornton's recording reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart, while Elvis's version became the most commercially successful, reaching the top of the R&B, Country, and Pop charts.

Typology: Schemes and Mind Maps

2021/2022

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ESSENTIAL QUESTION
How does the story of “Hound Dog”
demonstrate music culture’s racial mixing as it
differed from mainstream American life in the
1950s ?
OVERVIEW
People: Big Mama Thornton and Elvis Presley
The first version of “Hound Dog” was released
in March 1953 by Willie Mae “Big Mama”
Thornton, an African-American Rhythm and
Blues singer from Alabama. With her larger-
than-life personality and earthy vocal delivery,
Thornton was one of the Rhythm and Blues
performers who helped usher in the Rock and
Roll era. “Hound Dog” was written specifically
for Thornton by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a
white, Jewish songwriting team with a love for
R&B music, a genre generally associated with black audiences. The recording was produced by
Johnny Otis, the son of Greek immigrants who grew up in an African-American community and
identified as black. The mixing between races did not reflect the norms of segregated 1950s
American life, but behind the scenes in music culture, such mixing was possible. The recording
became the biggest hit of Thornton’s career, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart and
staying there for seven weeks.
In July 1956, Elvis Presley, a white singer from Memphis who as a teenager had developed
a fascination with black music, recorded his own version of “Hound Dog” for RCA Records.
Elvis combined elements of Country and Pop with R&B, ignoring racial classification in order
to showcase the variety of genres he had absorbed growing up in the South. His recording of
“Hound Dog” incorporated a fast tempo, prominent drumming, and a heightened vocal energy
associated with the emerging Rock and Roll sound. As a white artist, Elvis released a version
of “Hound Dog” that quickly overshadowed Thornton’s original, reaching the top of the R&B,
Country, and Pop charts. The record became a massive crossover success that appealed to
millions of young people, both black and white—a significant achievement of racial mixing in
pre-Civil Rights America.
INTERDISCIPLINARY LESSON: “HOUND DOG”
OVERVIEW
PARTNERSHIP LESSONS: LITTLE KIDS ROCK
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ESSENTIAL QUESTION

How does the story of “Hound Dog” demonstrate music culture’s racial mixing as it differed from mainstream American life in the 1950s? OVERVIEW People: Big Mama Thornton and Elvis Presley The first version of “Hound Dog” was released in March 1953 by Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, an African-American Rhythm and Blues singer from Alabama. With her larger- than-life personality and earthy vocal delivery, Thornton was one of the Rhythm and Blues performers who helped usher in the Rock and Roll era. “Hound Dog” was written specifically for Thornton by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a white, Jewish songwriting team with a love for R&B music, a genre generally associated with black audiences. The recording was produced by Johnny Otis, the son of Greek immigrants who grew up in an African-American community and identified as black. The mixing between races did not reflect the norms of segregated 1950s American life, but behind the scenes in music culture, such mixing was possible. The recording became the biggest hit of Thornton’s career, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart and staying there for seven weeks. In July 1956, Elvis Presley, a white singer from Memphis who as a teenager had developed a fascination with black music, recorded his own version of “Hound Dog” for RCA Records. Elvis combined elements of Country and Pop with R&B, ignoring racial classification in order to showcase the variety of genres he had absorbed growing up in the South. His recording of “Hound Dog” incorporated a fast tempo, prominent drumming, and a heightened vocal energy associated with the emerging Rock and Roll sound. As a white artist, Elvis released a version of “Hound Dog” that quickly overshadowed Thornton’s original, reaching the top of the R&B, Country, and Pop charts. The record became a massive crossover success that appealed to millions of young people, both black and white—a significant achievement of racial mixing in pre-Civil Rights America. O V E R V I E W

OVERVIEW (CONTINUED)

Places: Ariton, Houston, Los Angeles, Tupelo, and Memphis Born in rural Ariton, Alabama, Willie Mae Thornton left home at 14 to pursue a career as a professional singer. In 1952, Thornton, already signed to Don Robey’s Peacock Records and living in Houston,Texas, Thornton connected with bandleader Johnny Otis. In a Los Angeles recording session, Otis helped bring Thornton together with songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who presented her with the music and lyrics for “Hound Dog.” Working with Leiber, Stoller, and Otis, Thornton recorded “Hound Dog” at Radio Recorders Annex on August 13, 1952. The record was released in March of the following year. Like Thornton, Elvis Presley was raised in the South. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis grew up as an only child in a poor family. For much of Elvis’s early childhood, the Presleys lived in a series of rented rooms that were often in close proximity to African-American neighborhoods, where Elvis was exposed to black musical styles including the Blues, Gospel, and R&B. Combined with the spirituals he heard in church and the Country music his family listened to on the radio, Elvis’s musical education was diverse, and he absorbed it all. In 1948, the Presleys moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where Elvis attended high school. Like much of the South before the Civil Rights movement, Memphis was a segregated city. The Presleys would soon be living in the Lauderdale Courts, a housing project for low income households that was restricted to white families, while Elvis attended Memphis’s all- white Humes High School. But Elvis’s musical curiosity often brought him to Beale Street, a predominantly black part of town, where he could witness the vibrant culture of Memphis’s African-American community. In 1954, when a 19-year-old Elvis made his first recordings at Memphis’s Sun Studio, his style displayed the variety of musical sounds, both white and black, that he’d heard growing up in Memphis. This mixing of musical cultures would remain prominent in his 1956 recording of “Hound Dog.” Time: The song “Hound Dog” does not directly comment on race relations in 1950s America. But when we consider the people who recorded the song, the places where these recordings were made, and the pre-Civil Rights era when these recordings were released, we can begin to see how “Hound Dog” reflected an important racial mixing that foreshadowed the changes that would be fought for in the Civil Rights era. Between Big Mama Thornton and Elvis’s

Upon completion of this lesson, students will:

1. KNOW (KNOWLEDGE): - Artists and producers who contributed to the success of “Hound Dog,” including Big Mama Thornton and Elvis Presley - How the mixing of black and white styles in “Hound Dog” demonstrated the ability of musicians to unsettle established ideas about race relations in segregated 1950s America O B J E C T I V E S A C T I V I T I E S

2. BE ABLE TO (SKILLS):

  • Make connections between popular music culture and the social and political environments in which that music is created
  • Common Core: Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using well-chosen details and well-structured event sequences (Writing 3) 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) Doggie 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 images 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:
  • On which of these charts does Thornton’s recording of “Hound Dog” appear?
  • Do you think that Thornton was reaching a mostly black audience, or a mostly white audience? What does this racial separation on the charts suggest about race relations in 1950s America?. [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.]
  1. 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:
  • What areas of American society do you know were segregated during the early 1950s? [Answers may include: schools, restaurants, public transportation, hotels, bathrooms, etc.]
  • How do you think segregation would have affected an African-American touring performer?
  1. 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.]
  2. Display images from the 1956 Billboard R&B, Country, and Pop charts, and have students locate “Hound Dog” on each chart. Ask students:
  • How does Elvis’s success with “Hound Dog” compare to that of Thornton singing the same song?
  • What does Elvis’s appearance at the top of all three charts suggest about the size and racial makeup of his audience? [Note: Excluding Elvis, all artists on this Rhythm & Blues chart are African American. All artists on this Country & Western chart are white. And on the Best Selling Popular Records chart, all of the artists are white, excluding the Platters, who are an African-American group.]
  • What are some reasons why a white artist may have been able to reach wider audiences than an African-American artist in 1950s America? While Thornton’s recording had been released three years earlier, Elvis’s version became the most commercially successful.
  1. 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?
  2. 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:
  • What range of emotions do you think the people in the photos are feeling?
  • What do you think it felt like to be at school on that day?
  1. Continuing on the worksheet, groups should select two individuals from each photo for whom the group will creating “thought bubbles.” Use the first-person

PROCEDURE: (CONTINUED)

and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally. Speaking and Listening 4: Present information, findings, and supporting evidence such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience. SOCIAL STUDIES – NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR THE SOCIAL STUDIES (NCSS) Theme 1: Culture Theme 2: Time, Continuity, and Change Theme 4: Individual Development and Identity Theme 7: Production, Distribution and Consumption NATIONAL STANDARDS FOR MUSIC EDUCATION Core Music Standard: Responding Select: Choose music appropriate for a specific purpose or context. Analyze: Analyze how the structure and context of varied musical works inform the response. Interpret: Support interpretations of musical works that reflect creators’ and/or performers’ expressive intent. Evaluate: Support evaluations of musical works and performances based on analysis, interpretation, and established criteria. Core Music Standard: Connecting Connecting 11: Relate musical ideas and works to varied contexts and daily life to deepen understanding. VIDEO RESOURCES

  • Big Mama Thornton and Buddy Guy – Hound Dog (1965)
  • Elvis Presley – Hound Dog (1956)

FEATURED PEOPLE

  • Elvis Presley
  • Big Mama Thornton HANDOUTS
  • School Desegregation Thought Bubbleset R E S O U R C E S