BRING BIG MAMA HER FLOWERS
As our nation stands at the precipice of immense cultural and political change, it still often fails to look back and be held accountable for decades of transgressions. Never before in my lifetime has race and the politics of gender come into play with so much vigor and import. With the impending presidential election, the tragic murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the spiraling Covid-19 crisis, and Black Lives Matter protests, across America racism and oppression are rightfully under a microscope of late. On the heels of the Me Too movement, we continue to examine our actions and the shadow of sexism and harassment that has loomed over our male-dominated, euro-centric culture for as long as we can remember. As we watch Kamala Harris, the first black woman to ever be on the presidential ballot, being attacked by Donald Trump and his legions, I can’t help but be reminded of the politics of race and gender and how they play into the history of music, the field I have spent the last 30 years of my life working in.
Music and art seemingly are hoped to be at the forefront of progressive thinking from politics to sexual equality — at least in theory. The cultural memory of convenience that we exercise when looking at our musical history is measurable when examining the long and intricate history of race and sexism and its relationship to cultural appropriation. The last decade has seen a plethora of white singers, from Adele to Sam Smith to Justin Bieber and Justin Timberlake, trying on soul music when convenient and riding its wave to the top of the pop charts. This is not a knock on any of these artists. Blue-eyed soul has existed longer than I have been alive. White music is often inspired by Black people, it’s seemingly a tradition at this point.
Some say the notion or the term blue-eyed soul was invented for the Righteous Brothers on the heels of their massive success with Unchained Melody in the mid-sixties by a black Philly DJ named Georgie Woods. The term was nothing more than a marketing tool that came along at the right time in history. America was moving towards a notion of integration previously unheard of. The civil rights movement was in full bloom and Soul Music and the influence of black rhythms were being acknowledged by mainstream America’s embrace of Motown. Rock and Roll was almost 15 years old already, and we all knew Rock and Roll came from the Blues. Or did we?
In the modern pop culture lexicon we live in, Elvis Presley was the first white man to mine the well of black music to become a Rock and Roll superstar. It’s a fact Elvis benefited greatly from cultural appropriation. The direct line to where he copped his mojo is tangible, exacting, and a painful reminder of the double standards that existed in 1955. They still exist today.
I am not here to argue the relevance of white artists inspired by black culture or their validity. Eminem is one of my favorite rappers of all time. I have made Hip Hop music for more than half my life, on one level or another. Marshall Mathers, much like Janis Joplin, The Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughn and many other white artists who were inspired by and emulated black artists openly acknowledged their influences and debt to the black musicians who opened their minds and hearts to create culturally important and commercially successful music. There’s nothing wrong with this. But there is something inherently wrong in what Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Pat Boone, and many others did.
I think about the blues a lot in this context, having been exposed to the sounds of the Blues since I was old enough to put a record on a turntable. See, one of my first loves was rockabilly aka 1950s Rock and Roll. I started at the beginning with the greats Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and the already mentioned Elvis Presley aka The King.
The 9-year-old me explained how cool Hound Dog by Elvis Presley was to my mother one sunny afternoon in our cramped Lower East Side walk-up. My mom, a former member of the love movement laughed and disappointingly said “Elvis? Really? Let me play you the real version of that song”. She sauntered over to our cheap stereo and casually put on a record by a person I had never heard of before, showing me the album cover. This version of my hero Elvis’ song blew me away. My mom explained to me that Elvis was a rip-off artist, that the tune belonged to a Black woman named Big Mama Thornton. I gotta tell you, after that day I never looked at Elvis the same way. It opened the door to a lot of musical questions down the road. When Chuck D threw Elvis under a bus 2 decades later, I laughed having been there in my own mind since grade school. Hippie moms — You gotta love ‘em.
My other early musical love affairs were The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, both greatly indebted to Chuck Berry, 1950s Rock and Roll, and the Blues. The Stones early records were drenched in blues covers, openly paying homage to Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, and Jimmy Reed. I would soon come to learn their name came from a Muddy Waters lyric. The Beatles covered Chuck Berry’s genius Roll Over Beethoven hailing him as a musical magician and rightfully worshiping the man. The English blues revivalists paid their respects to these blues and black Rock and Roll giants in a way many early white southern Rock and Roll heroes did not. It was even more difficult to get your props if you were a black woman in the 1950s and 60s. Apparently, some things never change.
This brings me to share the story of Big Mama Thornton, one of my favorite blues artists and arguably the most important woman in the history of the genre. Race and the politics of gender have prevented her from getting her proper due. To say it’s a crime that the world doesn’t know her name is an understatement. When we speak about the masters of the blues idiom, her name is much too often omitted. This is a great American tragedy, one that speaks volumes about white America’s want to marginalize women of color. Big Mama not only helped birth the song that would make Elvis Presley a household name, but she is also one of the cornerstones in the great blues revival of the 60s. Unfortunately, most people outside of scholars of the genre don’t even know her name.
Willie Mae Thornton was born dirt poor in Arinton, Alabama in December 1926. Little is known about her childhood, though as the legend goes, she started singing in church where her father was a minister and her mother sang in the choir. Her mother died right before Willie Mae turned 14. She left home soon after and started cleaning and washing clothes at a local boarding house, singing in the local saloon and on the street where she also shined shoes part-time. Discovered busking by local blues singer Diamond Tooth Mary, young Willie Mae hit the road with Sammy Greens Hot Harlem Revue barnstorming in the Arkansas and Texas area. This would be the start of her professional singing career.
Sometimes billed as the “New Bessie Smith,” Big Mama settled in Texas in the mid-1940s and moved to Houston by 1948. She became a local star, performing regularly at The Bronze Peacock, Houston’s biggest black nightclub. She eventually signed a contract with club owner (and reputed music biz gangster) Don Robey’s Peacock Records in 1951, where she scored regional hits “Let Your Tears Fall Baby” and “Cotton Picking Blues.” Her live shows quickly became the talk of the Houston blues circuit — no one had ever heard a woman sing the blues like her before. She didn’t look or sound like anyone or anything else. She dressed like her fellow bluesmen, standing six feet and pushing over 300 pounds. She drank and sang harder than most of ’em, outperforming them nightly as well. Her reputation grew, and she became a huge draw on the Texas chitlin’ circuit.
At Robey’s urging, a young Willie Mae began touring outside the South with legendary bandleader Johnny Otis on the strength of her ever-growing reputation as an all-out performer. As part of Otis’ traveling Rhythm and Blues revue, Willie Mae performed all over the country, eventually landing a spot at the Apollo Theater where she was given her nickname Big Mama Thornton by Johnny himself. Knowing she was a star, Otis, who was doing double duty as Peacock Records’ A&R man and staff producer, was tasked with looking for tunes that could fit her unique style. This led the ever-insightful Otis to book sessions with burgeoning hit makers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoeller in Los Angeles at the end of the tour, in hopes of finding a signature song for Big Mama.
Lieber and Stoller were hot off the hit “Hard Times”, recorded by Charles Brown and Kansas City, retitled KC Lovin’ for Little Willie Littlefield (which would become a smash under its original title Kansas City for Little Richard a few years later). The future songwriting legends were asked by Otis to craft a tune specifically for Big Mama, one that would encompass her power and raw energy.
Stoeller said of Big Mama and the song in Rolling Stone in 1990 “She was a wonderful blues singer, with a great moaning style. But it was as much her appearance as her blues style that influenced the writing of ‘Hound Dog’ and the idea that we wanted her to growl it. Leiber added “We saw Big Mama and she knocked me cold. She looked like the biggest, baddest, saltiest chick you would ever see. And she was mean, a ‘lady bear,’ as they used to call ’em. She must have been 350 pounds. We needed to convey words that could not be sung. “But how to do it without actually saying it? And how to do it telling a story? We wrote Hound Dog for her and her persona”
As the story goes there were some studio mishaps and the drummer couldn’t nail the part. At Willie Mae’s urging, Johnny Otis (an accomplished drummer before he was a hit-making band leader) got behind the kit and provided the much-needed groove. While Johnny played the drums, Leiber and Stoeller took over as producers, which would cause legal complications down the line. Otis getting behind the drum kit inadvertently gave the future music biz moguls their first record production credit, which Otis openly disputed for years. Regardless of the legal dispute, the musical results were spectacular.
Big Mama’s vocals on Hound Dog are inarguably some of the most brilliant vocals ever put on wax. Her playful use of the lyrical double entendre is pure genius. Her power and sexual ownership of the lyrics are something to behold. Up to this point, no female singer outside the chitlin’ circuit had ever sung such an overtly sexual song from a female point of view — let alone committed it to wax. It was an empowering and bar-raising performance and would become her signature song, one which also catered to Big Mama’s sexual ambiguity. It would go on to sell over million singles for Diamond Don Robey’s Peacock label and is often cited as one of the songs that bridged the gap between Jump Blues and what would become Rock and Roll. There is one thing no one ever says about this piece of art and it is this: Elvis’ version is a white-washed hack job of this stunning record. There is no way anyone on earth can tell me his version, while wildly successful commercially, can hold a candle to her original.
Big Mama would earn a grand sum of 500 dollars for this tune. Don Robey would make hundreds of thousands. Leiber and Stoeller would go on to make millions during their careers. Johnny Otis didn’t do too bad for himself either, striking it big with his million-seller Willie and The Hand Jive in 1957. Big Mama, on the other hand, toiled away working the chitlin’ circuit, witnessing her friend and future blues legend Johnny Ace kill himself accidentally in Houston Texas on Christmas Day in 1954 no less. Just 3 years after selling over a million singles of her signature song Elvis Presley would claim this landmark ditty as his own and erase Big Mama’s version from all but the purists of listener’s ears.
Let’s talk about why this happened. There are a whole lot of whys at play here. For starters Don Robey was a crook, he rarely paid anyone. Big Mama was also a functional illiterate and signed a terrible contract, not that the gun-toting Robey honored it. Secondly, and most important Big Mama was a woman and a black woman at that. In an era when women were second-class citizens, a black woman no matter how talented was often further marginalized and exploited. Big Mama was deemed unmarketable for various reasons, among them her sexual ambiguity, her size, and the razor scars she carried on her face. She was never to truly benefit from this historical recording. Sadly, she often lived hand to mouth like many of our heralded blues legends did. One thing in life I know is this: It’s not fair, no matter how talented you are.
I challenge you to watch her belt her version out of the song and tell me she doesn’t deserve a place in the record books. To call the kettle black, maybe Elvis and Colonel Tom Parker could have given her some acknowledgment. They say he refused to ever perform the record with her live, rebuffing countless requests to do so. Once he became successful he could have publicly acknowledged her. That never happened, just like Jerry Lee Lewis never acknowledged the great Charles Brown or Huey Piano Smith. Chalk it up to another example in the long line of cultural appropriations that Rock and Roll is built on. Rock and Roll are based on the blues and The Blues is without a doubt one of the greatest American musical contributions to the world. Make no mistake like Rap music, The Blues is a Black American art form. So is Rock and Roll.
During the 50s, after Elvis’ ascent and the rise of Rock and Roll as America’s most important musical youth movement, Big Mama would continue to perform. She moved from Texas to California in the late 50s and settled in the Bay Area. She continued to gig, playing the west coast chitlin’ circuit, while recording sporadically for local labels, most notably Day-Tone records. A song she wrote, “Ball and Chain” was recorded during these sessions and became a staple of her live sets. This song would never be released by Day-Tone, yet would become the centerpiece of her live shows and become a modern blues standard of sorts. During this period Big Mama was at the top of her game, playing most weekends in the Bay Area and packing em in.
At live shows, she was known to play blues harp with the best of them, and she often hopped behind the drum kit to wow audiences. Her performances were and are legendary, as was her hard drinking lifestyle. Willie Mae was known to put it down as well as scrap with the best of them. Anything the guys could do, so could Big Mama. Having been burned countless times, she demanded to be paid in cash. She earned a reputation as “difficult” — an easy tag to put on any opinionated and talented woman of color and another example of the bullshit she endured. She was raw and outspoken, but could you blame her? She had helped invent Rock and Roll and had been written out of its history by white men. She had to scrape by to earn a living, while Elvis married a teenager and was celebrated for it. Black men like Don Robey went on to create lucrative businesses on the backs of artists like her and later Bobby Blue Bland (Robey’s Duke records was a successor of Peacock and Bland was its most successful artist). The long history of Blues artists getting ripped off by white and black record businessmen is endless — and people like Willie Mae were the recipients of the short end of the stick.
In the early 1960s, a blues resurgence began in the UK. The kids across the Atlantic started discovering new heroes, Black American heroes that outside of Black America were largely ignored by the mainstream in their own backyard. One of these heroes was Big Mama Thornton, who along with her peers would influence countless young white English musicians. Though Big Mama did not release much new material during the early 60s, this would soon change. In 1964, she was booked at the Monterey Jazz festival at the urging of the legendary writer/curator Ralph J. Gleason. At Monterey, she knocked ’em dead, playing alongside such stars as Miles Davis and Muddy Waters to the biggest mainstream audience she had ever been granted. Most people present had never seen a female blues singer of this magnitude. With her androgynous attire and powerful swagger, she was hailed as the performer of the festival. She parlayed this performance into a trip to Europe a year later. There, she toured the continent as part of the American Folk Blues Festival with her legendary peers John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, Fred McDowell, and Big Walter Horton, and appeared on prime-time television in Germany and England.
At the end of this tour, she would record her first full-length record in London, “Big Mama Thornton in Europe” for Chris Strachwitz’ landmark archivist label Arhoolie records. Let this sink in: Big Mama Thornton, the greatest female singer in the history of The Blues, the woman who helped birth Rock and Roll, waited until 1965 to record her first full-length record. Appearing on her debut are legendary musicians Buddy Guy and Walter Horton whom she was fresh off tour with. If not for the Blues revival, spurred on by young English kids named Mick, Eric, and Keith this may never have happened. Yet another painful metaphor for what it meant to be a unique and strong black woman in the 1960s in America.
As the Blues revival made its way across the Atlantic, and on the heels of her first record, Big Mama’s career started to flourish. Though oft-hampered by bands below her abilities, she continued to perform across the U.S. and in Europe. She recorded a follow-up album for Arhoolie records, “Big Mama Thornton with the Muddy Waters Blues Band” featuring none other than Muddy himself on Guitar, Otis Spann on Piano, and blues harp legend James Cotton. It is one of the high points in her discography and continued her straight-ahead blues mastery. She was embraced as a top-tier talent by her contemporaries and by the legions of new blues enthusiasts. The record was well-received in Europe and America. She continued to tour, appearing with acts like Chuck Berry and BB King in more mainstream settings and earning star billing outside the traditional blues circuit for the first time in her career.
In 1966, a young white Texas singer was in the audience at a San Francisco show to see her long-time idol Big Mama. Enamored by Big Mamas’ voice and persona, this young singer openly expressed her admiration for Willie Mae. Her name was Janis Joplin, and she would later adopt Big Mama’s signature song “Ball and Chain” transposing it to a minor key blues song with her band Big Brother And The Holding Company. Joplin would perform this version of Ball and Chain at The Monterey Pop festival in 1967, recording it for the film and the record. Unlike Elvis, Janis openly acknowledged Big Mama in a performance that was seen either on film or in person by millions of music lovers. This was the first time most of these people had ever heard of the greatest female blues singer who ever walked God’s earth. Again, let’s be completely transparent here, while Joplin is an icon and was a great singer in her own right, there is no way Janis sang “Ball and Chain” with the vocal prowess that Big Mama did. It is not even open for discussion. In fact, there probably is no Janis Joplin as we know her without Big Mama. If she were alive today she would tell you this herself.
Willie Mae continued to tour on the heels of Janis making “Ball and Chain” a hit song. The praise sent her way certainly helped her pay the bills. The unconfirmed legend is that Janis secured her a portion of the publishing on the song. She continued to play locally with makeshift bands. She deserved better musically, but with no real quality management and a strong amount of rightful distrust for the music industry, Willie Mae would never work with a top-flight manager. She continued to tour Europe but would not record an LP again until 1968 when she was signed to Mercury records in part due to Janis’ cover. Her major-label debut “Stronger Than Dirt” is arguably the greatest recording of Willie Mae preserved on wax, though not a pure blues album. Her version of “Ball and Chain,” is stellar, as are her vocals throughout the entire record, which included such contemporary soul tunes such as “Funky Broadway” in an effort to increase her bandwidth.
Not as traditional as her Arhoolie records, it’s still a beautiful testament to her artistry, including a reworking of her classic “Hound Dog.” Released in 1969 as the blues revival was winding down and the 70s was right around the corner, it is an important piece of her much too sparse catalog. She would record one more record for Mercury, the less well-received “The Way It Is” before being deemed expendable and dropped from the label.
Big Mama would continue to tour for the first half of the 70s, drinking her way across the country, usually driving her own Cadillac to shows up and down the West coast. She also continued to perform in Europe, where she remained a strong live draw, albeit it in smaller venues. The blues revival was over, and white rock bands playing blues-infused Rock and Roll replaced the want for authenticity the white European youth once craved. Living in LA, she toured Europe again with the American Folk Blues series as she had in 1965 and 1969, but the toll of years of drinking had begun to wear on her health and voice. She did not pay any heed to her health issues and continued to smoke and drink with gusto. It was just Big Mama’s way.
Big Mama would record 2 records for the Backbeat label, the first “She’s Back” which rehashed new versions of her classics (including “Hound Dog”, again) as well as fulfilling a lifelong dream of cutting a Gospel record with 1973’s “Saved.” This record is a beautiful juxtaposition of sorts. Big Mama was a blues woman. She lived the life, yet here she was on record communing with God. Listen to it and tell me you’re not moved deep in your soul by her rendition of “One More River.” Tell me you can’t hear her pain amidst the beautiful gospel choir that accompanies her. It embodies a complicated relationship with a higher power and her place in the world. Being a Black and sexually ambiguous woman, a “sinner” so to speak, you can almost hear her soul at the crossroads. It is a stirring example of her power and vulnerability.
In the late 1970s, Big Mama would record 2 more records for Vanguard, but her touring slowed down due to health problems — the decades of heavy drinking had caught up with her. In a 1979 TV special with Aretha Franklin, a now diminutive Big Mama shared the stage with Aretha, who lavished her with praise. It is an almost frightening visual, seeing Big Mama who had once weighed more than 300 pounds, emaciated and struggling to sing what was once second nature for her. The fact this happened to someone as musically important is another example of the shitty hand history had dealt her. I beg to ask — did Big Mama ever have health insurance? One of the many great tragedies of Big Mama’s story is she never saved a dime. No one knows how much money she earned and it is speculated she never paid taxes, living under the radar whenever possible. She was at this point living in a boarding house in LA, struggling to make ends meet, while still doing her best to perform in order to get by.
The topic of her sexuality is open to interpretation. It was never defined, it’s not fair for me to assign her gender preference, I never met the woman. She dressed in the style of a man most of her adult career. She never came out of any closest and there is no known woman or man in her life. By all assumptions, she was most likely gay though I do not feel it’s my place or anyone’s to declare this with any certainty. She dressed and sang androgynously, a gift, and a curse. It made her vocal style the unique piece of artistry it is. It gifted her “Hound Dog.” It also held her back in an era when being a sexually undefined and masculine black woman was as difficult as it may have ever been. It isn’t a cakewalk in 2020, but imagine being Big Mama in 1953, in the South nonetheless.
Nowadays she would be a diva, back then she was just a problem. Imagine if she had been given the opportunities or skillful management inferior male white artists were given. She would probably have never made the mistakes she committed in her long and arduous career. She may have had a “brand” of her own liking, she might have had a team of strategists fine-tuning her immense talent. Instead, she was another stellar black woman talent ripped off by white imitators. It’s time for Willie Mae Thornton to be recognized for the musical genius she was.
Big Mama’s story is tragic, unrecognized during her lifetime. She didn’t even live to see herself elected to the Rhythm and Blues Hall of fame — that happened 6 months after she passed away from a heart attack in a Los Angeles boarding house, broke and emaciated, weighing a mere 98 pounds. I wonder will she ever be included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside her song “Hound Dog” where she rightfully belongs? Will her name ever be given the spotlight that those who ripped her off were given, or will she continue to languish in relative obscurity because she was a Black Woman in a white music business world in a time when that meant being marginalized was the norm? Big Mama Thornton is indeed owed some musical history reparations.
I know this much: There are a plethora of women artists who were and are indebted to her. The list is lengthy. Women as diverse as Missy Elliot, Annie Lennox, Melissa Etheridge, Queen Latifah, Chrissy Hynde, and Aretha Franklin all owe a part of their mojo to Big Mama Thornton whether they know it or not. Aretha’s rendition of Respect speaks volumes about the type of marginalization and lack of empowerment Big Mama received in droves.
This ethos is directly translatable to Big Mama’s blues. Listen to her music, watch her performances in the countless videos which exist online and say to yourself this one simple truth: This woman needs to be recognized before her legacy is further obscured by time. Her story deserves better. In a nation where a Black woman is on the ballot for the 2nd most important office in the country, it’s time for Big Mama to be celebrated in a way befitting a queen. Let’s keep it 100 percent here: Big Mama deserves her flowers yesterday.
Dante Ross
Los Angeles California
