This Day in History: December 11th
Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, a blues and R&B singer whose recordings helped shape early rock and roll, was born on Dec. 11, 1926.
Thornton was the sixth of seven children born to George and Mattie Thornton. Records list Ariton, Alabama, as her birthplace, though she later stated she was born in Montgomery. She grew up in a church environment where her father was a Baptist minister and her mother sang.
“I used to go to church a lot, but I didn’t do too much singing in church,” she said via the Arhoole Foundation. Thornton left school after the third grade to care for her mother, who died of tuberculosis in 1939.
Thornton learned music informally.
“I never had no one teach me nothin’. I never went to school for music or nothin’,” she later said. She taught herself harmonica by age eight and studied the performances of blues singers, including Bessie Smith and Memphis Minnie. “I just started hearing the blues of Bessie Smith,” she recalled.
At 14, Thornton entered an audition for Sammy Green’s Hot Harlem Revue after performer Diamond Teeth Mary encouraged her to try out. Thornton said she sang “G. I. Jive” and “Worried Life Blues” and was hired, launching her touring career throughout the South.
After leaving the revue in 1948, Thornton settled in Houston, performed at the Eldorado Ballroom and signed with Don Robey’s Peacock Records. In 1952, she began working with Johnny Otis’s Rhythm and Blues Caravan. That same year, she recorded “Hound Dog,” written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller specifically for her.
Thornton said she resisted Leiber’s attempts to guide her delivery, telling him, “Don’t tell me how to sing no song.”
“Hound Dog” sold more than 500,000 copies and spent seven weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart in 1953. New York University professor Maureen Mahon said the recording is considered “an important beginning of rock-and-roll, especially in its use of the guitar as the key instrument.” Thornton said she received little financial return from the hit, stating, “Didn’t get no money from them at all.”
Her version was later overshadowed by Elvis Presley’s 1956 recording, which used altered lyrics and became an international success.
In 1961, Thornton wrote “Ball and Chain,” which Janis Joplin later recorded with her permission. The song’s popularity renewed interest in Thornton and led to royalty payments she said she had previously been denied.
Thornton continued to perform into the early 1980s. She died July 25, 1984, in Los Angeles of heart and liver disorders. In 2024, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted her posthumously in the musical influence category.