I went to see the Irish premier of this 2025 documentary last month knowing the bare minimum about Big Mama Thornton. Knowing little beyond that she had a strong role in the birth of Rock and Roll. I did not even know what her role with that birth was.
But the documentary soon informed me of the outline of the role in the music she gave birth to. Big Mama Thornton was originally called Willy Mae Thornton and was born in 1926 to lead the hard life those who were black and poor did, early on. She was physically strong, she had to be to survive the harsh life that she, and millions of others, were raised to live out, enduring a poverty they did not ask for amidst the great depression and other financial pressures. As a young adult she was 6 foot 1 inches tall and weighted up to 270 lbs, sometimes less than that. Her first public introduction to music was in the Baptist Church in her native Montogmery, Alabama. There her father was a minister and her mother sang from the front of the stage. Willy Mae went to church and sometimes sang, mostly she attended but did not sing. When Willy Mae was 13 her mother contracted tuberculosis and had to be nursed in the Montgomery Tuberculosis Sanitorium by Willy Mae until her death soon after. Willy Mae missed that much school for nursing her mother that she could not return to her education. She took her first job as a washer up in one of the roughter local taverns.
Many owners of record labels and managers of musical acts were innately untrustworthy characters who when anyone trusted them, then they did so either for them not knowing who they were trusting, having nobody else to trust, or desperation. Willy Mae Thornton's first break as a singer came when she was 14, from the older sister of the then recently died Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith. To see the footage of Bessie Smith, what litttle of it there is and even as it is unrepresentative of Smith as how she deserved to be seen, was one of the early treats in the documentary. Ma Rainey also died soon after, in 1939. With her strong vocal style Thornton became an early natural heir to those women who stamped their characters onto the blues, and onto 'race records' as they were known. Thornton would tour but not record for the next 11 years, the first 8 of them as a comedienne, singer, and dancer in a revue style show before she left the show. She felt sure she was being underpaid and cheated out of money she was owed. She had to wait until she was 25 before she cut her first sides 78 rpm sides as part of a version of the troupe she had left earlier. The sides were cut for E&W records of Houston. There she got her first song writing credits. Through a series of coincidences she was signed as part of her troupe to Peacock records in 1952. There, as a solo artist, she met the young Lieber and Stoller who wrote the song 'Hound Dog' around discussion they had with her. It was the first song they had written. She was awkward as she was coached into giving them the vocal performance they wanted as producers, but they got what they wanted when she could feel like she owned it as a self taught musician. She provided the backing band, and one of the stand out performances on the record is the drums which were played by her drummer Johnny Otis, The record sold locally and then sold across America, and gave her a name that in years to come would make her a headline act in gigs acrfoss America, and in Europe, Whilst her record label at the time denied her the co-credit for the song and denied her the earnings she should have got for co-writing and co-arranging the song.
From then on, in spite of her lack of secure grounding with a very male record industry, an uneasy relationship with being managed, a certain defensiveness about how to play and record a song, and never quite being on the top side of her economic situation as she should be (a standard complaint with blues artists), she was on her way.
For the next three decades she was touring, recording and sometimes resting to write more songs including 'Ball and Chain' as recorded to spectacular effect Janis Joplin who asked Big Mama Thornton if she may. The film fills lots of the holes in her story where there is no footage, or reports of events in her life, with shots of car lights on the road representing her life. The car headlights footage is intersperced with the recollections of those who knew her and have documented her life, some of them documenting it long after she died.
The film ends with footage filmed recorded by British television a Channel 4, who filmed her live on her last concerts where she is in full comand of the stage, both as a blues singer and as a fine example of a drag king. A woman who dresses stylishly in male clothing. Not that her sexuality was ever the couse of comment, she seemed to be above any such comment. I just thought her dress sense was just fabulous.
No comments:
Post a Comment