Big Mama Thornton (top)
and with her band (above)
September 2004
Blues, Black Rats, & Bumble Bees
Big Mama Thornton’s greatest recording reissued in time for the SF Blues Festival
by Larry Kelp
With her driving shouts and hollers, Big Mama Thornton was a blues belter extraordinaire who helped usher in rock and roll. Best known as the original singer of “Hound Dog,” she inspired and influenced such artists as Elvis Presley, Etta James, and Janis Joplin. Even though the big career breaks of those performers eluded her, she was their equal and more. Although she rarely had back-up bands with talent worthy of her, she sang like no one else, played drums and harmonica (instruments not usually associated with female singers in any genre), and wrote most of her own songs. “Hound Dog” was Thornton’s first No. 1 hit, but this Rockin’ Blues Queen had to deal with more than hound dogs in her rough and tumble life. There were black rats, bumblebees, heartaches, and crushing poverty. But even when she sang about her demons, she shouted, “Everything’s gonna be alright!”
Big Mama Thornton with the Muddy Waters Blues Band — 1966, (Arhoolie Records 9043), arguably one of the all-time great blues recordings, has just been saved from oblivion, thanks to the man who recorded it, local folklorist and Arhoolie owner, Chris Strachwitz. Re-issued for the first time on CD, the original session was one of those rare occasions where Thornton was backed by some of the greatest blues artists of the era. This was not just any Muddy Waters group: it featured piano legend Otis Spann and James Cotton on harmonica. And Thornton’s full-throttle Texas-roots vocals melded perfectly with Chicago’s finest electric blues ensemble. The Big Mama/Muddy pairing happened only once on record, but nearly 40 years later, its sound grabs you with a sweaty vitality and creative urgency rarely heard in today’s music.
Willie Mae Thornton was born in Alabama in 1926, one of seven children of a minister father and gospel-singing mother. She sang in church and discovered an affinity for playing drums and harmonica. At fourteen, she left home to travel through the South with Sammy Green’s Hot Harlem Revue, before settling in Houston, Texas, as part of its burgeoning blues and nightclub scene. For much of the ‘50s, she performed as a member of Johnny Otis’ Revue. The story of Thornton’s 1952 recording of “Hound Dog” is now classic roots-music lore: two white kids, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, brought her the song scrawled on the back of a brown paper bag. She added her own interpretation, and it became a No. 1 hit on the Billboard R&B chart the following year. Then Presley heard it, and made it a No. 1 pop hit in 1956.
By the early ‘60s though, without a record label or manager, Thornton was off the charts, forgotten, and living in Santa Cruz. That’s where Chris Strachwitz met her — a fateful encounter that would change both their lives. “I was known as a blues fanatic, so someone told me about her,” Strachwitz recalls, “and I went down to Santa Cruz to this bar on the Boardwalk. She was playing drums and singing, and playing a harmonica that she kept in a glass of water on the piano. Her guitar player was too drunk to play and fell off the stage, so it was just her and the piano player! That’s the kind of joint it was. It shows what happened to blues people, even with a hit like ‘Hound Dog.’
“I didn’t have a pot to piss in in those days. I was a poor schoolteacher scrounging, and Big Mama didn’t have a band; it was just two guys. But I wanted to record her with a good band. Gatemouth Brown was on tour, and I tried to get them together, but it didn’t happen. By then she’d moved to Los Angeles. I went to find her. I often had to be a detective to find musicians. After some searching I went to a park and there was a table with a bunch of people playing cards, and Big Mama was sitting at the end with a pistol on the table next to her. She saw me and shouted, ‘Hey, Chris! Howya doin’!’ She was the sweetest and most generous person and was always giving everything away. But she was also being taken advantage of by everyone in the music business, so she carried a gun.”
Strachwitz, who helped supply musicians for the American Folk Blues Festival (AFBF) tours of Europe (captured on two essential DVDs released last year with a who’s who of blues greats), paired Thornton with a band led by Buddy Guy for the 1965 AFBF tour. Strachwitz recorded that band in London.
In 1966, the Muddy Waters band came to San Francisco, and Strachwitz was determined to record Thornton with the group. Fortunately, Waters had a weeklong San Francisco club gig, so Strachwitz booked them and Thornton into the city’s Coast Recorders. In one session, the sparks flew fast and furious. In addition to Spann and Cotton, Waters’ band featured drummer Francis Clay, bassist Luther Johnson and guitarist Samuel Lawhorn. A few songs had been worked out, mostly Thornton compositions, but the rest was the band following her and Spann — the pair seemed to work telepathically, as if the piano and voice were one instrument. There are a couple of spirituals as well, going back to her church roots (she told Strachwitz at the session that she wanted to do an album of spirituals). In addition to the original album’s ten songs, the new CD includes seven previously unreleased tracks, including “Big Mama’s Shuffle,” an instrumental showcase for Thornton’s harmonica playing. Her “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” features one of Waters’ great guitar solos with Thornton playing drums. And there’s even her radical reworking of the Buddy Johnson ballad standard, “Since I Fell for You,” showing the tender side of this blues belter.
The blues was different in the ‘60s. It gave itself room to breathe and to develop tension — as much from the spaces as the actual notes. These musicians did it intuitively. As the blues achieved its greatest popularity in the ‘80s, record companies flourished and festivals grew. But subtlety and dynamics went out the window, replaced by hard-hitting electricity and rock drumming where each act tried to out-thunder its predecessor. As high-energy as Thornton was, she had amazing control and knew how to go, as Allen Toussaint would put it, “from a whisper to a scream.”While 1966 doesn’t have her hits, it’s her most consistently excellent recording, capturing her artistic and commercial peak. Thornton was getting rave reviews for her live performances, from the 1964 Monterey Jazz Festival to the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival. Her association with Strachwitz’ Arhoolie label concluded in 1968 with the first recording of her composition, “Ball n’ Chain,” which became Janis Joplin’s showstopper. Joplin was another Texas blues singer who often acknowledged her debt to Thornton, (not just for the song but for her whole style), during shows, Thornton went on to make several albums for the Vanguard label.
She continued to perform even after an auto accident, illness, and serious weight loss sent her on a downward spiral — sadly, an all too common fate among blues artists. In 1984, she suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 57.
The Thornton/Waters 1966 recording is a fitting monument to Big Mama’s gutsy style and gritty originality, a testament that should re-establish her as one of the blues’ greatest singers.
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