Hound Dog, Big Mama, Elvis and Appropriation

Agent 84 recently asked me to comment on on a document about Elvis and Cultural Appropriation of Big Mama Thornton’s cover of Hound Dog, my response unfortunately went past this is some bullshit, to where it made sense to just put it into its own document so as to not bog down Agent 84’s Sociological and Memetics article with too much of a Musical focus.

I remember once being in a recording studio with members of the rap group the Wu-Tang Clan back in the 1990s and one of the artists in that group was riffing about the history of white people stealing black people’s music, and the example he gave was Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog,” which he said that Elvis stole from a black performer. And I looked at him I said, “True, but the song was written by two Jewish guys.” And he looked at me funny, like he was mad at me, but also like at the same time he was wondering if that could possibly be true.

And I mean, from these different definitions of appropriation you have here, I don’t think you can consider that Lieber and Stoller appropriated anything, they contributed as much as they took one can say, and at the time being Jewish, they were oppressed people, like the black people they wrote songs for.

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