Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton Photo: YouTube screenshot
Big Mama Thornton — a six-foot tall, 300-pound, Black, gender-nonconforming blue musician who wore men’s apparel and sang with a growl — has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for her influence on the genre. Though Thornton didn’t personally identify as LGBTQ+, modern commenters have noted her “queer” influence on mid-20th-century music.
The self-taught singer’s best-known song, “Hound Dog” (1952), gained widespread fame when covered by the white rock-and-roller Elvis Presley; but she saw no royalties from this and some of her other original songs, due to not owning the copyrights.
Related:
“My singing comes from my experience… I never had no one teach me nothing,” she reportedly said. “I never went to school for music or nothing. I taught myself to sing and to blow harmonica and even to play drums by watching other people. I can’t read music, but I know what I’m singing. I don’t sing like nobody but myself.”
The child of a Baptist minister, Thornton grew up in Ariton, Alabama listening to blues songs by bisexual Black singer Bessie Smith. Thornton’s mother died in 1939, when Thornton was just 13 years old. Thornton dropped out of school and began working odd jobs that same year — one year later, she successfully auditioned for a touring variety show called “Sammy Green’s Hot Harlem Revue.”
From 1951 to 1954, Thornton began nationally touring with a group called “Johnny Otis’ California Rhythm and Blues Caravan.” She regularly sang in a men’s suit jacket, tie, and cowboy boots. In 1952, her large body, voice, and personality compelled Apollo Theatre manager Frank Schiffman to give her the nickname “Big Mama.”
That same year, she also recorded “Hound Dog,” a song about leaving a selfish, exploitative romantic partner. Its album sold over 500,000 copies and spent seven weeks as the number-one record on the national R&B charts. Despite its success, she only ever received one $500 royalty check for it (roughly $5,900 by modern standards).
As a Black woman singing in a racially segregated nation and a male-dominated field, Thorton’s “Hound Dog” was hailed as an “anthem of black Women’s power.” However, the all-white group Freddie Bell and the Bellboys’ began performing a spoof of the song that removed the references to adultery and was addressed to a literal dog.
Elvis Presley heard their version in 1956 and recorded his version that same year. Presley, who has been accused of appropriating Black music and dance, sold about 10 million copies of his version. It’s one of his best-selling songs and has been recognized by the Grammy Hall of Fame and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a song that shaped modern rock-and-roll.
Though Thornton’s career declined in the late 1950s and early ’60s, in 1961, she wrote “Ball And Chain,” a song about a woman who continues to love her abusive partner (whose gender is never revealed). Rock-and-roll musician Janis Joplin asked Thornton for permission to cover the song in 1969. The popularity of Joplin’s version helped renew interest in Thornton, and Thornton received royalty payments for it.
In 1965, Thornton toured around Europe, performing at jazz festivals alongside other musical greats like Muddy Waters, B. B. King, and Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson. She reportedly died on July 25, 1984 in Los Angeles at the age of 57 due to heart and liver disorders due to alcohol abuse. She was buried in a pauper’s grave with two other strangers in Inglewood Park Cemetery in Los Angeles County, California.
Lynnée Denise, author of Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters, wrote of Thornton in 2023, “Queerness also is about a level of comfort with the nonnormative. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sleeping with the same sex or that you can be simply clocked as lesbian because of how you present. It does mean that she modeled a refusal to adhere to what has been called traditional femininity.”
Queer writer Pamela Sneed wrote of Thornton, “There are debates about her sexuality, but no doubt in presentation and in life she was queer.”
Thornton received the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame’s Musical Influence award along with British musician Alexis Korner and English musician John Mayall. Eight other musicians and groups were inducted into the Hall of Fame also this year, including LGBTQ+ ally Cher, the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest, the Black funk/soul group Kool & The Gang and rapper Mary J. Blige.
