Search Results for hound

... Chapter Three: “Hound Dog,” Take One: Big Mama Thornton. Big Mama Thornton, Black Alabama blues singer of what we these days call female masculinity, recorded “Hound Dog,” written by white Jewish songwriters, with a band led by a Greek-American who considered himself Black, for release...

... Chapter Four: Elvis Presley Belatedly Records “Hound Dog”. This chapter offers a view of Elvis up close. Thanks to YouTube and DVDs we can linger on the TV appearances, where past listeners had only recordings to replay. This chapter traces the steps by which Elvis Presley covered “Hound Dog...

... Chapter Five: “Hound Dog” as Influence. Records, as material objects, travel, cut off from their origin, across time and region, becoming facts in the cultural ether but at times also prefigurations of social change. This chapter tracks both versions of “Hound Dog” and a bit of “Doggie...

... Chapter Six: Interpreting “Hound Dog.” Looking over the many books written about Elvis Presley through the years, one finds a particular arc. The first authors, older than Presley, had roots in swing; they saw both progress and poppycock in his 1956 coronation. Boomers (Nik Cohn in the United...

... Intro. The striking of Elvis Presley's “Hound Dog” from the most recent Rolling Stone list of pop's five hundred greatest songs, replaced by Big Mama Thornton's version, puts a subject on the table: how we think about rock and roll in an era when the punk critique, over style, seems almost...

... to Oklahoma sharecroppers, had one of these too-polished hits, hated as much by rockers as antirockers. If “Doggie in the Window” was fated to be damned by “Hound Dog,” what does that tell us about the murkiness of pop taste as it gets used to categorize people? There is nothing inherently oppositional about...

... of history, told in dog-themed numbers from “Old Dog Tray” by Stephen Foster and Mamie Smith's Jazz Hounds to that Frank Sinatra embarrassment, “Mama Will Bark.” Popular music history blackface minstrelsy show business noise ...