Who had a hit with Hound Dog before Elvis?

Hip swivel, sneer, a crowd going wild: Hound Dog is pure Elvis, right? The Apple certainly thinks so, and is already doing the dance. The Sole, who heard a lot of music lessons from under a piano, would like to introduce someone who sang it first and sang it big.

The short answer

Hound Dog was first a hit for Willie Mae ‘Big Mama’ Thornton. Her version, released in 1953, spent seven weeks at number one on the Billboard R&B chart. Elvis did not record it until 1956.

The real story

The song was written by the songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who met Thornton through bandleader Johnny Otis in 1952 and wrote it quickly with her powerful voice in mind. She recorded it in Los Angeles in August 1952, and Peacock Records released it early in 1953.

Thornton’s version is a growling, swaggering blues. The ‘hound dog’ is not a pet at all, but a no-good man she is sending packing. It was a huge success in the R&B market, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Thornton herself said she received a single cheque for 500 dollars and never saw another, a sadly common story for Black artists of the era.

Then the song took a detour through Las Vegas. A lounge act, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, reworked it with tamer lyrics and a bouncy rock and roll beat. Their rewrite added a line about the dog failing to catch a rabbit, turning the song into something about a literal dog. Elvis saw them perform it in Las Vegas in 1956 and loved it.

He performed it on The Milton Berle Show in June 1956, causing a national uproar over his dancing, and recorded it a month later. Released as the flip side of Don’t Be Cruel, it topped the US pop chart for 11 weeks and became one of his biggest sellers.

Why people get it wrong

Elvis’s version was so enormous, and so tied to his image, that it buried the original for many listeners. Her record was a hit in the R&B market, so many pop listeners never heard it at all.

It is also easy to assume a star’s signature song was written for them. In the 1950s, though, covering a recent hit was standard practice.

The Wiper would like the record to show that the song belongs first to Big Mama Thornton, and that the scoreboard is now officially corrected. He will forget this by Tuesday, so please remember it for him.

“Elvis was brilliant, but Big Mama Thornton got there first and sang it like thunder. I’ve been listening from under desks for decades and I still never heard her name in class. That’s on us.”