CaylaCatz on BudgetPixel

1950s/1960s day. My mind popped to Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" Recently @DavidP introduced Mama Thornton to me. In 1952, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller met her to write a song for her. Wiki tells Hound Dog's origin story: "Leiber and Stoller "forged a tune to suit her personality—brusque and badass". In an interview in Rolling Stone in April 1990, Stoller said: "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 recalled: "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, and she had all these scars all over her face", conveying words which could not be sung. "But how to do it without actually saying it? And how to do it telling a story? I couldn't just have a song full of expletives." She's kicking out her man. "Hound dog" was slang at the time of a man who lives off a woman. Actually they wanted to use M...F...er. Wiki: "Leiber and Stoller wrote the song "Hound Dog" in 12 to 15 minutes, with Leiber scribbling the lyrics in pencil on ordinary paper and without musical notation in the car on the way to Stoller's apartment. Said Leiber, "'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy." According to Leiber, as soon as they reached the parking lot and Stoller's 1937 Plymouth, "I was beating out a rhythm we called the 'buck dance' on the roof of the car. We got to Johnny Otis's house and Mike went right to the piano … didn't even bother to sit down. He had a cigarette in his mouth that was burning his left eye, and he started to play the song." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoHDrzw-RPg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hound_Dog_(song)

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