Who recorded it first

Hound Dog

Not an Elvis original — a 1952 Big Mama Thornton record

It is one of the most complete cover-eclipses in American music: almost everyone takes ‘Hound Dog’ for an Elvis Presley original, but Elvis’s 1956 version is a cover. The song was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — both nineteen — and first recorded by Big Mama Thornton in 1952, whose record topped the R&B chart. Stranger still: Elvis wasn’t even copying Thornton. He was copying a lounge parody of her record by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys.

The record

Who recorded it first

Original recording
Big Mama Thornton, 1952
Written by
Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller
First released
February 1953 (Peacock 1612) — No. 1 R&B
Made famous by
Elvis Presley, 1956 (No. 1 pop, 11 weeks)

How we traced it

The song was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — both nineteen at the time — and first recorded by Big Mama Thornton on 13 August 1952, released the following February on Houston’s Peacock label Wikipedia ↗.

Unlike many eclipsed originals, Thornton’s record was a genuine hit: it reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart in 1953. But it lived on the R&B side of a segregated music market, and did not cross into the mainstream pop audience that would later crown Elvis.

Elvis’s 1956 version was not even a direct cover of Thornton. He built his arrangement on a comic lounge parody performed by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, which he saw in Las Vegas in 1955 — which is why his lyrics and tempo differ so much from the original SecondHandSongs ↗.

SecondHandSongs — the original and every cover
Know more about the original — or think we’ve got it wrong? Add a source →

Paste a URL and we’ll check it. This doesn’t change the page — it goes to our review queue, and if it holds up we update the record.

Fact-check

The attribution problem

This is a layered music misattribution: nothing about Elvis’s record is fake, but the belief that he originated ‘Hound Dog’ is wrong on two counts — there was an earlier hit, and even his arrangement came secondhand.

The beliefcover, not original

‘It’s an Elvis song’

Elvis’s 1956 version is a cover. The song was recorded four years earlier, in 1952, by Big Mama Thornton the history ↗.

The originalfirst to record it

Big Mama Thornton, 1952

Her record hit No. 1 on the R&B chart — this was no forgotten B-side. It was eclipsed not because it flopped, but because it lived on the R&B side of a segregated market that white pop radio largely ignored.

The arrangementthe version Elvis copied

Freddie Bell and the Bellboys

Elvis based his tempo and reworked lyrics on the Bellboys’ 1955 Las Vegas lounge parody, not on Thornton’s original — so even his ‘version’ of the song was two steps removed from the source.

Written by Leiber and Stoller, first recorded by Big Mama Thornton in 1952, and made famous — but not originated — by Elvis Presley in 1956 the record ↗.

Context

Why the cover ate the original

Most cover-eclipses happen because the original flopped. ‘Hound Dog’ is the harder case: Big Mama Thornton’s record was a No. 1 R&B hit, and it still got buried. It was buried by the racial geography of 1950s American radio, where a Black R&B smash and a white pop smash occupied almost separate worlds — and only one of them was remembered as ‘the’ version.

The detail people find hardest to believe is that Elvis wasn’t even reworking Thornton. He was reworking a comedy lounge act’s parody of her, glimpsed in Las Vegas. The song the world thinks of as Elvis’s is a cover of a parody of a record most listeners have never heard.

The three creators, in order
  • Leiber and Stoller write the song, 1952 — both aged nineteen.
  • Big Mama Thornton records it, 13 August 1952; released 1953 → No. 1 R&B.
  • Freddie Bell and the Bellboys turn it into a comic lounge number, 1955.
  • Elvis sees the Bellboys in Las Vegas and copies their arrangement.
  • Elvis records it, 1956 → No. 1 pop for eleven weeks; Thornton’s original fades from mainstream memory.
The song the world thinks of as Elvis’s is a cover of a parody of a record most listeners have never heard.

The original recording artist

Big Mama Thornton

1926–1984 · American blues and R&B singer

Willie Mae ‘Big Mama’ Thornton (1926–1984) was an Alabama-born blues singer with a growl that could fill a room. Her 1952 ‘Hound Dog’ was a No. 1 R&B hit, yet she is said to have earned only a few hundred dollars from it — and she wrote ‘Ball and Chain’, later a signature for Janis Joplin, to much the same fate. She is the person the song’s fame most thoroughly erased.

Popularly credited as the original

Elvis Presley

1935–1977 · American singer

Elvis Presley (1935–1977) released his ‘Hound Dog’ in 1956 and turned it into one of the biggest records of the decade — eleven weeks at No. 1. His version is genuinely his own performance, and a great one; the only error is chronological, assuming a 1956 juggernaut must be where the song began. It began in 1952, and he was working from a nightclub parody of it, not the source.

The songwriters

Leiber and Stoller

Jerry Leiber (1933–2011) & Mike Stoller (b. 1933) · American songwriting duo

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote ‘Hound Dog’ as teenagers — both nineteen — before going on to write ‘Jailhouse Rock’, ‘Kansas City’, ‘Stand By Me’ and dozens more. They are the third party the song’s fame obscures: not the original singer, not the famous one, but the writers whose names most people never learn even after they’re told the record isn’t Elvis’s.