Book Review: A Nontraditional Look at Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters

Those looking for your standard music biography à la Peter Guralnick best move on. Instead, self-describing her work as an "experimental biography," Lynnée Denise tells the story of Willie Mae Thornton through a nontraditional, Black consciousness prism as part of UT Press' Music Matters series. For starters, the author – a Los Angeles-raised, Amsterdam-based child of Eighties hip-hop – eschews her subject's familiar "Big Mama" moniker for the more respectful and accurate Willie Mae. Denise traces Thornton's 40-year career from Southern, rural, traveling revues; her time in Houston recording for Peacock Records and traveling the Chitlin' Circuit; and her many years out in the Bay Area on through appearances at renowned international music festivals. The author embraces Thornton's gender nonconformity of wearing pants, overalls, boots, and cowboy hats, placing her alongside groundbreaking queer artists like Little Richard and R&B star Billy Wright. Despite some cringe-worthy factual mistakes, Denise effectively delivers perhaps her most salient point: Who is authorized to convey the story of these Black musicians? To paraphrase the text, should it be white journalists, promoters, and record company executives who dictate how the music is contextualized and defined in literature, musicology, and white-owned music publications? And who largely profits from the music? In fact, the story around Thornton's original recording of "Hound Dog" in 1952 and how Elvis Presley reaped the profits with his version in 1956 is a recurring issue throughout the book. That, and the more positively looked upon relationship with Janis Joplin, who asked permission to record "Ball and Chain" and then subsequently paid Thornton appropriate royalties for use of her music. Thornton's career embraced many aspects of African American musical tradition, but at the end of the day the blues innovator was one of a kind, and that's what matters.

Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters by Lynnée Denise, University of Texas Press, 207 pp., $24.95