Willie Mae (Big Mama) Thornton - Hound Dog (1953) 🇺🇸 shellac 78 RPM

ABOUT THIS SONG:
"Hound Dog" is a twelve-bar blues song written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Recorded originally by Big Mama Thornton on August 13, 1952, in Los Angeles and released by Peacock Records in late February 1953, "Hound Dog" was Thornton's only hit record, selling over 500,000 copies, spending 14 weeks in the R&B charts, including seven weeks at number one. Thornton's recording of "Hound Dog" is listed as one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's "500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll". "Hound Dog" has been recorded more than 250 times. The best-known version is the July 1956 recording by Elvis Presley.
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ABOUT THIS ARTIST:
Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton (December 11, 1926 – July 25, 1984), was an American singer and songwriter of blues and R&B. The Encyclopedia of Pop, Rock and Soul described Thornton saying "Her booming voice, sometimes 200-pound frame, and exuberant stage manner had audiences stomping their feet and shouting encouragement in R&B theaters from coast to coast from the early 1950s on". Thornton was the first to record Leiber and Stoller's "Hound Dog", in 1952,[3] which was written for her. It became Thornton's biggest hit. Thornton's other recordings include her song "Ball and Chain", made famous in the late 1960s by Janis Joplin. Though later recordings of her songs by other artists sold millions of copies, she was denied royalties by not holding the publishing copyrights to her creativity. Thornton died of a heart attack and liver disorders, penniless in a boarding-house in Los Angeles, California, and was buried in a shared pauper's grave. In 2024, Thornton was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the musical influence category.

SOURCES: WIKIPEDIA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hound_D...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mam...