May 3, 2026

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

Show Notes
Transcript

Big Mama Thornton's 1952 "Hound Dog" was powerful R&B—woman calling out no-good man, fierce and funny. Written by white teenagers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for her. Hit #1 R&B, sold 500K copies. Big Mama paid $500 total while Leiber/Stoller made fortunes. 1956: Elvis heard it, sped it up, made it rock and roll, softened the edge. July 1956: #1 for eleven weeks on pop, country, AND R&B charts simultaneously. Helped define rock and roll, made Elvis a superstar. Big Mama got nothing—no new royalties, no acknowledgment. The most complicated cover: nobody purely villain or victim. Garrett Fisher explores structural racism, cultural appropriation, and uncomfortable truths about who profited from Black musical innovations.

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Caalaroga Shark Media. I'm Garrett Fisher, and this is the

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Hit Maker Chronicles. We're at number six on our countdown

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of the top ten best cover songs of all time,

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as voted by the staff at Calaroga Shark Media. Over

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the past month, we've looked at covers that transformed the originals,

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that became more famous than the songs they were covering,

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that shifted perspectives and changed meanings. This week, we're looking

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at the most complicated cover on our entire countdown, a

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cover that raises questions about race, cultural appropriation, artistic interpretation,

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and what it meant to be a black artist in America.

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In the nineteen fifties, Hound Dog by Elvis Presley one

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of the most iconic rock and roll songs ever recorded,

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a song that helped define what rock and roll could be,

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A song song that's been played millions of times, covered

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hundreds of times, become part of the fundamental DNA of

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American popular music. But before Elvis Presley recorded hound Dog

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in nineteen fifty six, it was a completely different song.

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It was an R and B number recorded by Big

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Mama Thornton in nineteen fifty two. It was powerful raw

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and sung from the perspective of a black woman telling

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off a no good man, and when it came out,

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it was a massive hit in the R and B world.

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This is the story of how one song became two

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completely different recordings, and how that transformation reveals both the

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creative power of reinterpretation and the uncomfortable realities of race

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and exploitation in the American music industry. Let's start in

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Los Angeles in nineteen fifty two. Willie May Big Mama

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Thornton was a blues and R and B singer from

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Alabama who'd been working the Chitlin circuit for years. She

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was twenty five years old, stood nearly six feet tall,

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had a voice that could shake a room, and had

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recently signed with Peacock Records, a small independent label run

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by Don Robie out of Houston. Johnny Otis, a bandleader

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and talent scout, was working with Peacock and looking for

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material for Big Mama. He reached out to two young

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songwriters named Jerry Lieber and Mike Staller. They were nineteen

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years old, white Jewish, and absolutely obsessed with black music.

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They'd been writing R and B songs in Los Angeles

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trying to capture the sounds they loved, and they'd already

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had some success. Lieber Installer wrote hound Dog specifically for

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Big Mama Thornton. They wrote it in her voice from

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her perspective. The song was about a woman calling out

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a man who was all talk and no action, comparing

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him to a hound dog that's always crying but never

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catching any rabbits. It was fierce, it was funny, It

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had attitude. Big Mama Thornton recorded hound Dog in August

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nineteen fifty two at Radio Recorders in Los Angeles. The

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arrangement was pure R and B honking saxophones, a shuffle rhythm,

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and Big Mama's voice deep, powerful, commanding. She sang it

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like someone who dealt with no good man her whole

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life and had finally had enough. The record was released

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on Peacock Records and it was a hit, A legitimate

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chart topping R and B hit. Hound Dog went to

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number one on the Billboard R and B charts in

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nineteen fifty three and stayed there for seven weeks. It

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sold close to half a million copies in the R

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and B market. That was huge for an independent label.

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That was a breakthrough. Big Mama Thornton was supposed to

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become a star from this, except that's not what happened.

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Because of the way the music industry worked in nineteen

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fifty two, particularly for black artists on small independent labels.

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Big Mama Thornton didn't own her recording, she didn't control

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the publishing. She was paid a flat fee for the

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session and a small royalty rate that she barely saw

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any money from. Don Roby, who ran Peacock Records, had

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a reputation for exploitative contracts. He controlled the masters. He

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often claimed songwriting credits he didn't deserve. He kept his

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artists on the road and paid them as little as

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he could get away with. Big Mama Thornton later said

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she received a single check for five hundred dollars for

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hound Dog. That's it, one check for a song that

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went to number one and sold half a million copies. Meanwhile,

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Jerry Lieber and Mike Staller, who actually wrote the song,

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were starting to build a fortune. Hound Dog was being

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covered by other artists, it was generating publishing royalties, and

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Lieber and Staller were becoming two of the most successful

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songwriting teams in American music. But Big Mamma Thornton's version

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was still primarily known in the R and B world.

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White audiences, for the most part, hadn't heard it. Radio

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was aggregated. R and B stations played black music for

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black audiences, pop stations played white artists for white audiences.

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There was crossover, but it was rare. And then in

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nineteen fifty six, a twenty one year old singer from

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Memphis named Elvis Presley heard hound Dog. Elvis had been

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listening to black music his whole life. He'd grown up

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in Memphis, hanging around Beal Street, absorbing blues and gospel

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and R and B. He loved Big Mama Thornton's version

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of hound Dog, but when he and his band started

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playing it live, they didn't try to recreate her R

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and B arrangement. They sped it up. They made it

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rock and roll. They changed the feel entirely. Elvis started

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performing hound Dog on his nineteen fifty six tour. The

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crowds went crazy for it. He'd do that hipswiveling thing

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that was scandalizing parents across America, and the teenagers would scream.

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The song became a showstopper. RCA Records, which had just

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signed Elvis to an unprecedented contract, decided to record it.

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On July second, nineteen fifty six, Elvis went into the

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studio in New York City. They recorded hound Dog with

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a completely different arrangement than Big Mama Thornton's version. Faster tempo,

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driving drums, Scotty Moore's guitar playing that bouncing rockabilly rhythm,

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and Elvis's voice not deep in commanding like Big Mama's,

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but youthful, energetic, almost playful. The lyrics were also changed.

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Big Mama's version was explicitly about a no good man.

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Elvis's version was more ambiguous. It could be about a man,

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a woman, a dog, anything. The edge was softened, the

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specificity was removed. Hound Dog was released as a single

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in July nineteen fifty six, paired with Don't Beat Cruel

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on the B side. Both songs were massive hits, but

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together they created a phenomenon. The single went to number

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one on the Billboard Pop charts, the Country charts, and

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the R and B Charts simultaneously. It stayed number one

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for eleven weeks. Eleven weeks in nineteen fifty six. That

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was unprecedented. Elvis performed hound Dog on the Milton Burl Show,

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The Steve Allen Show, and most famously on The Ed

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Sullivan Show, where he was filmed only from the waist

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up because his hip movements were considered too sexually suggestive

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for television. The song became one of the best selling

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singles of all time. It made Elvis Presley a superstar.

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It helped establish rock and roll as a legitimate musical genre.

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It changed American popular culture, and Big Mama Thornton, who'd

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recorded the original version that Elvis had heard and loved,

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got nothing. No new royalties, no renewed interest in her version,

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no acknowledgment that the song had come from the R

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and B world she inhabited. We'll be right back. So

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let's talk about what makes this complicated, because it would

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be easy to make this a simple story of theft

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and appropriation, but it's more nuanced than that. First, the songwriting.

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Jerry Lieber and Mike Staller wrote hound Dog. They owned

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the publishing rights. When Elvis recorded the song, Lieber and

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Stoller got paid handsomely. The song made them wealthy. They

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went on to write dozens of hits for Elvis and

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other artists, becoming two of the most important songwriters in

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rock and roll history. Big Mamma Thornton didn't write the song,

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so legally she had no claim to publishing royalties from

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Elvis's version. That's just how songwriting works. The person who

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writes the song owns it, not the person who records

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it first. But here's the thing. Big Mama Thornton's recording

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is what made hound Dog a hit. Her interpretation, her

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vocal performance, her arrangement. That's what proved the song worked.

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Without her version being a number one R and B

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hit in nineteen fifty three, Elvis probably never would have

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heard it, and she was paid almost nothing for her

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recording five hundred dollars, while the song went on to

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generate millions of dollars in revenue. That's not Elvis's fault.

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That's the fault of an exploitative record industry that routinely

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cheated black artists out of their fair compensation. Don Robe

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at Peacock Records controlled Big Mama's contracts and her masters.

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He made money. She didn't second the racial dynamics in

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nineteen fifty six, a white artist could take a song

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that had been successful in the black music world and

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make it a pop hit. In a way that the

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black original artist never could not because the white version

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was necessarily better, but because radio stations would play it,

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television shows would book it, white audiences would buy it.

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Elvis didn't steal Hounddog from Big Mama Thornton in any

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legal sense. He recorded a different version of a song

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that was available for anyone to cover, but he was

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able to benefit from that cover in ways that Big

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Mama never could, purely because he was white and she

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was black. That's not Elvis being malicious. That's structural racism

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in the music industry. Third, the artistic question, is Elvis's

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version better than Big Mama's. That's subjective. They're fundamentally different recordings.

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Big Mama's version is raw, powerful, explicitly feminist in its

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call out of a no good man. Elvis's version is energetic, fun,

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less specific in its target. Big Mama's version is a

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great R and B record. Elvis's version is a great

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rock and roll record. You can love both, you can

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prefer one over the other, but they're not really the

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same song in any meaningful sense beyond sharing lyrics and

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a basic melody. What's not subjective is that Elvis's version

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became culturally dominant. When people think of hound Dog, they

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think of Elvis, they don't think of Big Mama Thornton.

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Her version became a footnote, a piece of trivia, something

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you learn when you dig into the history of rock

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and roll. In later years, Big Mama Thornton talked about

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this in interviews. She was proud of her version. She

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acknowledged that Elvis had made the song famous in a

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way she never could have, but she was also bitter,

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rightfully so, about the fact that she'd been cheated out

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of fair compensation and that her contribution had been largely

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erased from popular memory. She continued performing for decades. She

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had a resurgence in the nineteen sixties and seventies during

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the Blues Revival, when white rock fans started discovering the

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black blues artists who'd influenced the music they loved. She

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played festivals, recorded albums, earned respect as a pioneering blues singer,

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but she never got rich. She never got famous on

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the level that Elvis did. She died in nineteen eighty four,

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largely unknown to mainstream audiences, while Hounddog continued to be

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one of the most famous songs in American music. Jerry

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Lieber and my Staller meanwhile became legends. They wrote Jailhouse Rock,

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stand by Me Yackety Yak, Charlie Brown, dozens of other classics.

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They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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They were celebrated as pioneers of rock and roll songwriting.

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They always credited Big Mama Thornton's version as the original

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and acknowledged that they'd written it specifically for her. They

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spoke respectfully about her in interviews, but they also made

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millions of dollars from a song that she'd helped make

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famous and for which she received almost nothing. That's the

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complexity of Hound Dog. Nobody involved was purely a villain

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or purely a victim. Elvis loved black music and wanted

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to honor it, but he also benefited enormously from being

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able to access that music in ways that black artists couldn't.

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Lieber Installer wrote a great song and deserved to be

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compensated for their work, but they got rich while Big

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Mama stayed poor. Big Mama Thornton created a definitive vers

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version of the song, but she didn't own it and

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couldn't control what happened to it, and the music industry

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of the nineteen fifties was built on systems that routinely

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exploited black artists, paid them unfairly, denied them opportunities, and

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allowed white artists to profit from black musical innovations. Hounddog

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is number six on our countdown because it's one of

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the most famous covers in history, because it helped define

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rock and roll, because Elvis's version is genuinely great. But

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it's also number six because it forces us to reckon

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with uncomfortable truths about how the music industry worked, how

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race shaped, who got opportunities and who didn't, and how

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the story we tell about rock and roll often erases

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the black artists who created it. Big Mama Thornton's hound

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Dog and Elvis Presley's hound Dog are both essential recordings,

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both deserve to be remembered, both should be celebrated. But

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only one of them made the artist rich and famous,

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and that wasn't the person who recorded it first. This

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is Garrett Fischer, and this is the hit maker Chronicles.

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Join us next Sunday for number five on our countdown

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of the top ten best cover songs of all time.