The Greatest Cover Songs of All-time: 6. Elvis Presley - "Hound Dog"

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. I'm Garrett Fisher, and this is the Hit Maker Chronicles. We're at number six on our countdown of the top ten best cover songs of all time, as voted by the staff at Calaroga Shark Media. Over the past month, we've looked at covers that transformed the originals, that became more famous than the songs they were covering, that shifted perspectives and changed meanings. This week, we're looking at the most complicated cover on our entire countdown, a cover that raises questions about race, cultural appropriation, artistic interpretation, and what it meant to be a black artist in America.

0:46 In the nineteen fifties, Hound Dog by Elvis Presley one of the most iconic rock and roll songs ever recorded, a song that helped define what rock and roll could be, A song song that's been played millions of times, covered hundreds of times, become part of the fundamental DNA of American popular music. But before Elvis Presley recorded hound Dog in nineteen fifty six, it was a completely different song. It was an R and B number recorded by Big Mama Thornton in nineteen fifty two. It was powerful raw and sung from the perspective of a black woman telling off a no good man, and when it came out, it was a massive hit in the R and B world.

1:31 This is the story of how one song became two completely different recordings, and how that transformation reveals both the creative power of reinterpretation and the uncomfortable realities of race and exploitation in the American music industry. Let's start in Los Angeles in nineteen fifty two. Willie May Big Mama Thornton was a blues and R and B singer from Alabama who'd been working the Chitlin circuit for years. She was twenty five years old, stood nearly six feet tall, had a voice that could shake a room, and had recently signed with Peacock Records, a small independent label run by Don Robie out of Houston. Johnny Otis, a bandleader and talent scout, was working with Peacock and looking for material for Big Mama. He reached out to two young songwriters named Jerry Lieber and Mike Staller. They were nineteen years old, white Jewish, and absolutely obsessed with black music.

2:27 They'd been writing R and B songs in Los Angeles trying to capture the sounds they loved, and they'd already had some success. Lieber Installer wrote hound Dog specifically for Big Mama Thornton. They wrote it in her voice from her perspective. The song was about a woman calling out a man who was all talk and no action, comparing him to a hound dog that's always crying but never catching any rabbits. It was fierce, it was funny, It had attitude. Big Mama Thornton recorded hound Dog in August nineteen fifty two at Radio Recorders in Los Angeles. The arrangement was pure R and B honking saxophones, a shuffle rhythm, and Big Mama's voice deep, powerful, commanding. She sang it like someone who dealt with no good man her whole life and had finally had enough. The record was released on Peacock Records and it was a hit, A legitimate chart topping R and B hit. Hound Dog went to number one on the Billboard R and B charts in nineteen fifty three and stayed there for seven weeks. It sold close to half a million copies in the R and B market. That was huge for an independent label.

3:40 That was a breakthrough. Big Mama Thornton was supposed to become a star from this, except that's not what happened. Because of the way the music industry worked in nineteen fifty two, particularly for black artists on small independent labels. Big Mama Thornton didn't own her recording, she didn't control the publishing. She was paid a flat fee for the session and a small royalty rate that she barely saw any money from. Don Roby, who ran Peacock Records, had a reputation for exploitative contracts. He controlled the masters. He often claimed songwriting credits he didn't deserve. He kept his artists on the road and paid them as little as he could get away with. Big Mama Thornton later said she received a single check for five hundred dollars for hound Dog. That's it, one check for a song that went to number one and sold half a million copies. Meanwhile, Jerry Lieber and Mike Staller, who actually wrote the song, were starting to build a fortune. Hound Dog was being covered by other artists, it was generating publishing royalties, and Lieber and Staller were becoming two of the most successful songwriting teams in American music. But Big Mamma Thornton's version was still primarily known in the R and B world.

4:56 White audiences, for the most part, hadn't heard it. Radio was aggregated. R and B stations played black music for black audiences, pop stations played white artists for white audiences. There was crossover, but it was rare. And then in nineteen fifty six, a twenty one year old singer from Memphis named Elvis Presley heard hound Dog. Elvis had been listening to black music his whole life. He'd grown up in Memphis, hanging around Beal Street, absorbing blues and gospel and R and B. He loved Big Mama Thornton's version of hound Dog, but when he and his band started playing it live, they didn't try to recreate her R and B arrangement. They sped it up. They made it rock and roll. They changed the feel entirely. Elvis started performing hound Dog on his nineteen fifty six tour. The crowds went crazy for it. He'd do that hipswiveling thing that was scandalizing parents across America, and the teenagers would scream.

5:52 The song became a showstopper. RCA Records, which had just signed Elvis to an unprecedented contract, decided to record it. On July second, nineteen fifty six, Elvis went into the studio in New York City. They recorded hound Dog with a completely different arrangement than Big Mama Thornton's version. Faster tempo, driving drums, Scotty Moore's guitar playing that bouncing rockabilly rhythm, and Elvis's voice not deep in commanding like Big Mama's, but youthful, energetic, almost playful. The lyrics were also changed. Big Mama's version was explicitly about a no good man. Elvis's version was more ambiguous. It could be about a man, a woman, a dog, anything. The edge was softened, the specificity was removed. Hound Dog was released as a single in July nineteen fifty six, paired with Don't Beat Cruel on the B side. Both songs were massive hits, but together they created a phenomenon. The single went to number one on the Billboard Pop charts, the Country charts, and the R and B Charts simultaneously. It stayed number one for eleven weeks. Eleven weeks in nineteen fifty six. That was unprecedented. Elvis performed hound Dog on the Milton Burl Show, The Steve Allen Show, and most famously on The Ed Sullivan Show, where he was filmed only from the waist up because his hip movements were considered too sexually suggestive for television. The song became one of the best selling singles of all time. It made Elvis Presley a superstar.

7:26 It helped establish rock and roll as a legitimate musical genre. It changed American popular culture, and Big Mama Thornton, who'd recorded the original version that Elvis had heard and loved, got nothing. No new royalties, no renewed interest in her version, no acknowledgment that the song had come from the R and B world she inhabited. We'll be right back. So let's talk about what makes this complicated, because it would be easy to make this a simple story of theft and appropriation, but it's more nuanced than that. First, the songwriting.

8:08 Jerry Lieber and Mike Staller wrote hound Dog. They owned the publishing rights. When Elvis recorded the song, Lieber and Stoller got paid handsomely. The song made them wealthy. They went on to write dozens of hits for Elvis and other artists, becoming two of the most important songwriters in rock and roll history. Big Mamma Thornton didn't write the song, so legally she had no claim to publishing royalties from Elvis's version. That's just how songwriting works. The person who writes the song owns it, not the person who records it first. But here's the thing. Big Mama Thornton's recording is what made hound Dog a hit. Her interpretation, her vocal performance, her arrangement. That's what proved the song worked.

8:54 Without her version being a number one R and B hit in nineteen fifty three, Elvis probably never would have heard it, and she was paid almost nothing for her recording five hundred dollars, while the song went on to generate millions of dollars in revenue. That's not Elvis's fault. That's the fault of an exploitative record industry that routinely cheated black artists out of their fair compensation. Don Robe at Peacock Records controlled Big Mama's contracts and her masters. He made money. She didn't second the racial dynamics in nineteen fifty six, a white artist could take a song that had been successful in the black music world and make it a pop hit. In a way that the black original artist never could not because the white version was necessarily better, but because radio stations would play it, television shows would book it, white audiences would buy it.

9:49 Elvis didn't steal Hounddog from Big Mama Thornton in any legal sense. He recorded a different version of a song that was available for anyone to cover, but he was able to benefit from that cover in ways that Big Mama never could, purely because he was white and she was black. That's not Elvis being malicious. That's structural racism in the music industry. Third, the artistic question, is Elvis's version better than Big Mama's. That's subjective. They're fundamentally different recordings. Big Mama's version is raw, powerful, explicitly feminist in its call out of a no good man. Elvis's version is energetic, fun, less specific in its target. Big Mama's version is a great R and B record. Elvis's version is a great rock and roll record. You can love both, you can prefer one over the other, but they're not really the same song in any meaningful sense beyond sharing lyrics and a basic melody. What's not subjective is that Elvis's version became culturally dominant. When people think of hound Dog, they think of Elvis, they don't think of Big Mama Thornton.

10:59 Her version became a footnote, a piece of trivia, something you learn when you dig into the history of rock and roll. In later years, Big Mama Thornton talked about this in interviews. She was proud of her version. She acknowledged that Elvis had made the song famous in a way she never could have, but she was also bitter, rightfully so, about the fact that she'd been cheated out of fair compensation and that her contribution had been largely erased from popular memory. She continued performing for decades. She had a resurgence in the nineteen sixties and seventies during the Blues Revival, when white rock fans started discovering the black blues artists who'd influenced the music they loved. She played festivals, recorded albums, earned respect as a pioneering blues singer, but she never got rich. She never got famous on the level that Elvis did. She died in nineteen eighty four, largely unknown to mainstream audiences, while Hounddog continued to be one of the most famous songs in American music. Jerry Lieber and my Staller meanwhile became legends. They wrote Jailhouse Rock, stand by Me Yackety Yak, Charlie Brown, dozens of other classics.

12:09 They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They were celebrated as pioneers of rock and roll songwriting. They always credited Big Mama Thornton's version as the original and acknowledged that they'd written it specifically for her. They spoke respectfully about her in interviews, but they also made millions of dollars from a song that she'd helped make famous and for which she received almost nothing. That's the complexity of Hound Dog. Nobody involved was purely a villain or purely a victim. Elvis loved black music and wanted to honor it, but he also benefited enormously from being able to access that music in ways that black artists couldn't.

12:50 Lieber Installer wrote a great song and deserved to be compensated for their work, but they got rich while Big Mama stayed poor. Big Mama Thornton created a definitive vers version of the song, but she didn't own it and couldn't control what happened to it, and the music industry of the nineteen fifties was built on systems that routinely exploited black artists, paid them unfairly, denied them opportunities, and allowed white artists to profit from black musical innovations. Hounddog is number six on our countdown because it's one of the most famous covers in history, because it helped define rock and roll, because Elvis's version is genuinely great. But it's also number six because it forces us to reckon with uncomfortable truths about how the music industry worked, how race shaped, who got opportunities and who didn't, and how the story we tell about rock and roll often erases the black artists who created it. Big Mama Thornton's hound Dog and Elvis Presley's hound Dog are both essential recordings, both deserve to be remembered, both should be celebrated. But only one of them made the artist rich and famous, and that wasn't the person who recorded it first. This is Garrett Fischer, and this is the hit maker Chronicles.

14:07 Join us next Sunday for number five on our countdown of the top ten best cover songs of all time.