The Roots of Rock

WHEN Elvis Presley stormed the pop-music world with "Hound Dog" in the summer of 1956, not everyone was ready to bow before the newly anointed king of rock 'n' roll

- EDDIE DEAN

Newspapers with a black readership, like the St. Paul Recorder, noted that the veteran R&B singer Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton had first recorded the song a few years before.

In Thornton's rendering, "Hound Dog" was gutbucket blues laced with yelps and howls aimed at a twotiming man. The song rode the R&B charts for some months in 1953 and spawned several covers, including Presley's, which was exciting enough to revolutionize pop music but tepid compared with Big Mama's streetwise original. "Willa Mae Thornton's version," declared the Recorder, "is a million times better than Presley's or anybody else's."

The black press was keeping close tabs on the predicaments of performers like Thornton, whose down-home, grassroots music was rocket fuel for Presley on his rise to stardom. She was a seasoned pro who'd cut her teeth as a teen in a minstrel show troupe a decade before her hit, which sold 500,000 copies but, by her own estimate, earned her only $500. A year after Presley serenaded a basset hound on national television (on "The Steve Allen Show") to plug his platinum bestseller, Thornton was barely scraping by in Los Angeles.

Big Mama is one of the mostly unsung black-music mavericks who get their due in "Before Elvis," a thrilling cultural history that follows the career trajectories of "foundational figures who inspired, taught, and uplifted the King," as Preston Lauterbach puts it. The result is a deftly intertwined, fully realized group portrait of performers whose music and performing styles Presley devotedly drew from.