Turn the Volume Up: The Forgotten Mothers of Rock ’N’ Roll
Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton was an artist that created a genre of music that was based on black female excellence and denying the crushing stereotypes that existed for those who lived at the intersection of race and gender in the 1950s. Thornton’s work on her biggest hit, “Hound Dog” represents a revolutionary form of musicality and black femininity that came to be known as Rock ’N’ Roll. This form of musicality was then taken from the black women who created it and commercialized into a genre that excludes them. Maureen Mahon explains in “Listening for Willie Mae ‘Big Mama’ Thornton’s Voice: The Sound of Race and Gender Transgressions in Rock and Roll”:
Thornton was not voiceless in the sense that the disenfranchised people that cultural anthropologists often discuss are. She made records and received press coverage. However, in many popular music histories, Thornton has been reduced to a symbol: the ripped off African American musician on whose unacknowledged shoulders subsequent generations of rock and rollers stand. (Mahon 4)
Thornton creates a sound and image that is both liberating and entertaining. Listen to her grit, her forceful vocals, her stage appearance, and her command of the band.
Rather than staying silent during the guitar solo, Thornton participates in a call and exchange with the guitar player. She improvises “Aw, play it, boy, play it…“Aw, you make me feel good. Now wag your tail. Now get it, get it,” According to ethnomusicologist Maureen Mahon,
Commanding a man to wag his tail marks a gender-role reversal that encapsulates the disruptive and dangerous form of femininity that Thornton embodied….Thornton maintains a confident attitude, bringing the blues tradition of outspoken women into the R&B context and helping to set the style for rock and roll by putting sexuality and play with gender expression in the foreground” (Mahon 8–9).
Thornton’s stage presence and unapologetic sexuality while singing a song that tells the story of a woman confronting her abusive partner is a key example of the liberating black femininity that blues singers like Thornton expressed. In the original 1953 recording, the lyrics show a Black Woman’s Standpoint:
You made me feel so blue
You made me weep and moan
You made me feel so blue
Well you made me weep and moan
You ain’t looking for a woman
All your lookin’ for is a home
When Elvis covered “Hound Dog” in 1956, he usurped black art in its purest form and refined it into a form deemed acceptable to the Western world. His jerky, crotch-centric movements and similarly forceful vocals co-opt and rip off Thornton’s image of feminine masculinity and devalues it from an expression of liberation to an expression of domination.
Presley’s lyrics in his cover of Hound Dog erased the Black Woman’s Standpoint. He turned the subject of the song into a dog, and sung about its inability to obey orders. He says, ““You ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine.”
Presley’s appropriation was never a problem for the public. He made more money off Thornton’s work than Thornton could have dreamed, and she never received the money or acclaim she deserved for the work she did.
In a 1971 interview, Thornton explains the situation she and many black female artists who started rock ’n’ roll were in:
Interviewer: What about Elvis? He give you anything for “Hound Dog”?
Thornton: I never got a dime.
Interviewer: You mean you didn’t even get a box of Geritol?
Thornton: I didn’t even get a box of nothing.
Turner: Did he ever say hello to you at any time?
Interviewer: Did he tip his hat, or something?
Thornton: Well, he refused to play with me when he first come out and got famous. They wanted a big thing for Big Mama Thornton and Elvis Presley. He refused. And I’m so glad I can tell the world about it. [laughs]
Interviewer: Well, one thing we’re going to do is tell the truth.
Thornton: Well, that is the truth.
(Mahon 11)
Black female rockers in the 1950s were in a situation where the work and art they created to save their own lives was not deemed good enough for mass media. It was commercialized through a white, male-centric, and euro-centric lens and rereleased for profit. Since discrimination has made it impossible for black women to enter a rock ’n’ roll industry where their work is ignored or trivialized, they are forgotten as the people who started the genre in the first place. Remembering the Black femininity, Black musicality, and the African-American experience that started Rock ’N’ Roll, in Mahon’s words, “broadens our scholarly understanding of music making”. Thank you to incredible black women such as Bessie Smith, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Etta James for giving rise to rock ’n’ roll with their powerful voices. I am sorry that rock ’n’ roll subsequently stifled those voices.
Source:
Mahon, Maureen. “Listening for Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s Voice: The Sound of Race and Gender Transgressions in Rock and Roll.” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 15.1 (2011): 1–17. Web.
