There are some songs out there that are so linked to an individual that a long and circuitous musical history is slighted and too often forgotten. Such is the case with one of our favorite little tunes, “Hound Dog.” One could write a musicological dissertation on the history of this tune but, hopefully, this simple musical musing will be enough to slake your interest. There’s more to this tune than Elvis!
To begin, our song “Hound Dog” is a twelve-bar blues song written in 1952 by then 19-year-old songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It was first recorded by blues singer Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton. It was her first hit record and it put her and “Hound Dog” into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Thornton was a small-time, back-room blues singer with a great moaning style, but it was as much her appearance as her growly, bluesy voice that influenced the writing of “Hound Dog.” 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.”
Thornton wanted to reverse her musical fortunes at the time and her agent approached these young songwriters. After listening to Thornton rehearse several blues numbers, Leiber and Stoller quickly penciled out a song to suit what they saw as her “brusque and badass” personality.
In fifteen minutes of song-writing inspiration, Leiber remembered a slang expression from the Baltimore neighborhood where he grew up: “Hound Dog”—a euphemism referring to a man who sought a woman to take care of him, usually in exchange for “a bit more” than mere companionship. The simple lyrics morphed into a bawdy blues lament of a woman throwing a no-good man out of her house and her life.
You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.
Quit snoopin’ ’round my door.
You can wag your tail,
But I ain’t gonna feed you no more.
A great song to record for the blues market, but, in the early 1950s, it was a bit too bawdy for the mainstream radio disc-jockeys of the day. So, as a NEXT chapter in the song’s history, it became “sanitized” for the teeny-bopper mainstream!
To give “Hound Dog” the requisite doggie shampoo, the founder of “Teen Records”—sensing a teenage hit—recruited a popular Las Vegas lounge act, “Freddie Bell and the Bellboys,” to rewrite the lyrics.
They replaced the racy with the ridiculous, turned a declaration of no more sex—“You can wag your tail but I ain’t gonna feed you no more.”—into a reprimand for poor hunting skills—“Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine.” They also replaced “Snoopin’ ’round my door,” with “Cryin’ all the time.” The song was now literally about a dog!
Now “street legal,” the song was given a rock and roll rhythm and, as performed by the Bellboys in their Las Vegas act, “Hound Dog” became a comedy-burlesque song with what was described at the time as “show-stopping va-va-voom choreography”—one way to give the dog a bath and, literally, wash away the blues!
Now, the THIRD chapter. The best-known version of “Hound Dog” is, of course, the 1956 recording by Elvis Presley. His recording sold about 10 million copies globally and was his best-selling song for over thirty years! Presley’s recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1988, and is listed as one of “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.”
Pretty good for a third-generation song! Needless to say, this is the cleaned up and blow-dried version most of us know and that appears, as would be expected, in most of our PG-rated songbooks.
Lieber disliked the, er, mongrelizing of his original lyrics, but the skyrocketing popularity of the Presley recording cemented Lieber’s fame as one of the pioneers of Rock-and-Roll and he and Stoller partnered with Presley on many more songs including: “Love Me“, “Jailhouse Rock“, “Loving You“, “Don’t“, and “King Creole“. You’ll find other tunes by the duo out there including “Kansas City,” “Stand by Me,” “Yakitiyak” and , “Love Potion No. 9.”
In his first appearance on the Ed Sullivan TV Show in 1956, Presley gyrated and sang “Hound Dog” but was shown on TV mostly above the waist—another way to “sanitize” his performance, along with the song’s already sanitized lyrics. Needless to say, this trick didn’t quite turn out as planned and the rest is musical history!
Anyway, here is a REALLY cleaned up version of “Hound Dog” featuring a decidedly NOT Thornton or Elvis take on our tune. Click or tap on the triangle in the next image for a look and listen.
And, of course, not to leave we “eldies” out, click or tap on the triangle in the next image for a “Geri-Atric” take on our tune!
So, just how far has our little dog gone?
Keep that hound dog of yours–human or canine–on its leash and STAY TUNED!
NOHOBANJO OF NORTHAMPTON, AND NOW EASTHAMPTON, "MUSICAL MUSINGS" 