Hound Dog

Teenage songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were invited by bandleader Johnny Otis to write a song for Willie Mae 'Big Mama' Thornton, a towering, fiercely independent blues shouter. They penned 'Hound Dog' in about fifteen minutes. In the studio, Thornton snarled the lyrics, completely rejecting the young songwriters' attempts to direct her vocal phrasing. Her aggressive, dominant performance yielded a massive R&B hit. Four years later, a young Elvis Presley would record a sanitized, sped-up version with rewritten lyrics, becoming a global icon while Thornton's groundbreaking original was largely relegated to the shadows of rock history.