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The sleeve of Elvis Pressley's RCA single of Hound Dog featured a photo of him singing to a real dog on the Steve Allen show..
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It was on this date in 1958 that Elvis Presley’s version of Hound
Dog was certified as selling three million copies in the United States a little more than two
years after it had been released on July 12, 1956. It was only the third record ever to hit that
mark and it did it in much shorter time than the others, both Christmas perennials—Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and Gene
Autry’s Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. If there had ever been any doubt that the
landscape of American popular music had
been made over by an epic earthquake,
there was none anymore.
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Pressley's Gold Record for Hound Dog is on display at Graceland in Memphis.
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Jazz
based dance music had dominated the scene since the 1920s. But times—an economics—were changing. A long musician’s
strike against the major record
labels at the end of World War II had
taught popular singers to put out product without the backing of Big Bands. The Bands themselves were enormously
expensive to keep on the road. During
the late '40’s hundreds folded leaving only a handful of big names and big
draws still on the road. Radio stations found it cheaper to play
records than broadcast live programs from their studios or remotes from hotels
and ballrooms.
After decades of Depression and war the public seemed to yearn for something simpler, sweet, even
nostalgic. It was an era of love songs and ballads where melody triumphed
rhythm and of close harmony groups, both Black
and White.
Around the edges of the culture, niche alternatives were on the
rise. The raw styles of country and urban blues were morphing into a new style, dubbed rhythm and blues or R&B which attracted wide Black
audiences and appealed to daring whites.
Hillbilly and cowboy music were merging into a new
style called Country and Western and
stars like Hank Williams were
beginning to attract fans all over the country.
Meanwhile with the Big Bands on the
wane, Jazz musicians were freed from rigid
charts and arrangements and a
return to the form’s improvisational
roots took startling new directions.
Be Bop combos were pushing
the edge of music—but it was “listening” music, not dance numbers and was too complex and sophisticated for the new generation of teens who just wanted music they could party to.
It was in this post-war time that rock and
roll began to emerge. The origins of
the style reach back—some blues recordings from as early as 1939 had elements
of the new sound. There are various
candidates for the first true rock and roll song. Among them That’s All Right Mama by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup
in 1946 (Presley’s cover his first hit record in ’54); Wynonie Harris’s 1948 version of Ray Brown’s Good Rockin’ Tonight; Rock This Joint by Jimmie Preston
and the Prestonians in 1949; Saturday Night Fish Fry by Louis Jordan and The Tympany Five the
same year; and Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston
and his Delta Cats in 1951.
All of those were by Black artists growing directly out
of urban blues infused with a raucous style and driven my electric guitars and/or saxophones. Others argue it wasn’t really rock and roll until it was
done by White musicians and the
introduction the Country and Western based Rockabilly. For these folks former country yodeler Bill Haley with his new band the Comets recorded Crazy Man Crazy in 1953 and the
break-away hit Rock Around the Clock in ’54 represents the true birth of rock
and roll.
The same year Sam Phillips was assembling his stable
of young Rockabillies for his Sun Record
Label in Memphis—Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Louis, and Johnny
Cash, all of them familiar with call
and response, blues, and Black gospel
music. And they mined those songs as
covers or inspirations for original tunes.
They were shaking up music and getting air play from powerful disc jockeys with big teen age followings. By ’55 the rock and roll revolution was
on—but not yet won.
So how did a
silly song about a dog become the cultural steamroller that made Pressley truly
a mega star and make infant rock and
roll the undisputed leviathan of pop music? Well, to begin with it wasn’t about a dog….
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Leiber and Stoller on the Tonight Show with Jack Parr.
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The answer lies
in the often overlooked “third root” of rock and roll—the largely Jewish New York based professional
songwriters, most laboring for music
publishers, who had been interpreting Black cultural for most of the 20th Century from Tin Pan Alley to the legendary Brill
Building. In the case of Hound Dog the unlikely perpetrators were
a pair of 19 year old upstarts, Jerry
Leiber and Mike Stoller who had
already had some success peddling Hard Times for Charles Brown and Kansas City for Little Willie Littlefield recording as K. C. Loving, both moderate R&B hits in 1952.
In August of
that year they were invited to meet Big
Mama Thornton, a raw edged blues belter who was struggling to gain a
foothold on Peacock Records. They were introduced by band leader Johnny Otis. They watched her rehearse and were impressed—and
a little frightened, Leiber later said.
After casting
about for ideas they came upon using some Black street slang for a pimp or a gigolo living off a woman.
The song was to be about her kicking him to the gutter. Once the idea took shape, the song itself
came quickly. The pair reported jotting
it down in ten or fifteen minutes on the car ride back to Stoller’s apartment. They were so excited that they turned right
around and came back to Otis’s place where Leiber rushed to the piano and pounded
it out standing up singing:
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.
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Big Mama Thortons's down and dirty shout was an R&B hit but little heard by white audiences.
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Stoller and
Leiber took over from Otis in producing the recording session for Peacock after
Otis had to sit in as drummer and
couldn’t run the session. The record was
released in February 1953 to positive trade reviews and hit it big in Black
urban areas. It spent fourteen weeks on
the Billboard R&B charts, seven
of them at number one and was the #3 hit of the whole year.
Although most
white Americans never heard the record, its success spawned numerous “answer
songs.” These songs kept Peacock Records
attorneys working overtime on copyright
infringement cases. The most notable
of those actions was against Sam Phillips who claimed writing credits for an
answer song Bear Cat performed by Rufus
“Hound Dog” Thomas. It was Sun
Record’s first big hit. But when the
courts found Phillips guilty, the fines and court costs nearly bankrupted the label. To save the company he had to sell the
contract of his hottest property,
Presley, to RCA Victor.
Among the most unusual of several covers was a
Western Swing version by Bob Wills and
His Texas Playboys.
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Elvis got permission to use Freddie Bell and the Bellboys' sanitized lyrics and arrangement and even borrowed Bell's hip swiveling.
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But the most
influential was Philadelphia based Teen Records version by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, a White
group which had become an established Las
Vegas lounge act. Bell sanitized the
lyrics for white audiences, just as the early songs of Little Richard and other Black acts had been. All the sexual
innuendo was either removed and replaced by new lyrics or obscured. Just having the song sung by a man muddied
the original core metaphor. The new
version went:
You ain’t
nothin’ but a hound dog
Cryin’ all the
time.
You ain’t
nothin’ but a hound dog
Cryin’ all the
time.
Well, you ain’t
never caught a rabbit
And you ain’t
no friend of mine.
This sanitized version was now literally
about a dog. Unfortunately for Bell,
tiny Teen Records did not have the muscle to make his recording anything more
than a local Philadelphia hit.
While all of
this was going on Leiber and Stoller themselves had become hot
commodities. They had established their
own label, Spark Records producing
hits like Smokey Joe’s Cafe for The
Robins. The label was later bought
by Atlantic which left the boys in
charge of their own division with the freedom to produce for other labels as
well. Now high powered song
writer/producers, they were soon churning out hit after hit in a legendary
career that itself helped reshape.
In 1956 Presley
was on the hunt for new material for RCA.
As an ardent blues fan he knew and admired Big Mama Thornton’s original
and of course was very familiar with Rufus Thomas’s ill-fated Sun label answer. Friends also reported that he liked to whistle and sing along with the Bob Wills version. So the song was on Presley mind when he and
his backup band caught Bell’s act at the Silver
Queen Bar and Cocktail Lounge in the Sands
Casino. Bell was doing it as a comedy change-up number, a virtual burlesque including gyrating choreography all to a three
beat so called “Latin riff.”
Presley asked Bell for permission to record it, to which Bell eagerly agreed,
hoping that it would hype sales of a planned LP that would include his own version.
Presley tried
it out in live performances through the spring of ’56. Like Bell, he used it as comic relief. Audience reactions were strong. But when he closed one of his biggest dates
yet in front of 7000 home town Memphis fans at the Cotton Festival the response was overwhelming. It became his closing number for many years.
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Elvis first performed Hound Dog on national television on the Milton Berle Show with the hip gyrations, not as legend has it on the Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan showcased Presley after Berle and Steve Allen but insisted he be shot only from the waist up to prevent his family audience from being scandalized.
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He next tried
it out on his first big national TV appearance on the Milton Berle Show on June 2.
On Berle’s advice he performed for the first time without his guitar and
his hip swinging gyrations became a national sensation and scandal. Appearing on the Steve Allen Show a few weeks later, Presley good naturedly let
Allen turn the song into a parody of a parody crooning to a basset hound while in white tie and tails.
On July 2,
1956, the morning following the Allen show, Presley took it to RCA’s New York
recording studios and it was released a scant two weeks later with Don’t
Be Cruel on the B side. It
was an immediate cross genre hit. It scored #1 on both the Country and Western
and R&B Billboard charts and rose
to #3 on the pop charts that year. Radio
stations around the country were blasting the tune and juke boxes were collecting nickels
as never before. The whole country
was listening to Pressley and his Hound
Dog.
Stoller was
using some of his new wealth on a European
vacation while all of this was going on and was unaware of it. He returned to the States on the ill-fated
liner Andrea Doria which had sunk
after collision with another liner off of Nantucket. Stoller was among the passengers rescued and Leiber was at the New York
dock to greet him on July 26 with some startling news.
In their mutual
memoirs, Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography they would
recall that Leiber said: “We got a smash
hit on Hound Dog,” Stoller said, “Big
Mama’s record?” And Leiber replied: “No. Some white guy named Elvis
Presley.” Stoller went on to comment, “I
heard the record and I was disappointed. It just sounded terribly nervous, too
fast, too white. But you know, after it sold seven or eight million records it
started to sound better.”
Indeed.
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