Eric Weisbard’s Hound Dog is the latest addition to Singles, a new Duke University Press series of short books on individual recordings. It is a fun, erudite, sometimes knowingly provocative canter through the aesthetic, moral, and political coordinates of a song that occupies an important, if highly contested, place in modern US popular music.
As Weisbard points out, “Hound Dog” has long been saddled with a hefty ideological and interpretive burden. Composed by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, two young Jewish New York songwriters besotted with African American music, the song was reworked and personalized to such an extent by blues belter Big Mama (Willie Mae) Thornton that she could reasonably claim a cowriting credit for her number one rhythm-and-blues hit single on Peacock Records in 1953. Predictably, a publishing–recording–broadcasting industry riven with racism, sexism, and no little classism failed to reward Thornton appropriately for her creativity. That slight, itself emblematic of a whole sordid story of exploitation, expropriation, and marginalization, was made even more conspicuous when Elvis Presley had gargantuan international success with the song in 1956.
Weisbard notes that Presley’s recorded version – the product of thirty-one takes as the singer pursued his singular vision – was also a work of studied individualism and creativity, more influenced by a pantomime version of the tune performed in Las Vegas by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys than by Thornton’s original recording. Still, the song, like Presley, has become a convenient touchstone for scholarly, journalistic, and artistic engagement with the volatile blend of appropriation, homage, parody, and creative reimagination at the heart of rock and roll, with the racial dynamics of those relationships at the heart of the story. It is not enough, however, Weisbard insists, to shrug and simply say “it’s complicated” before offering some ways – he’s too smart to claim he is revealing the way – to navigate that complexity.
For Weisbard, there are precarious but important truths, or at least valuable insights, to be mined from the myths and legends that have coalesced around “Hound Dog.” Blending informed commentary with unostentatious theoretical assurance, he is an entertaining and generally persuasive guide through this interpretive minefield. He is also delightfully unabashed about his personal investment in this music and this story. He wears his rock-and-roll heart proudly on his analytical sleeve.
One of the best aspects of the book is when Weisbard engages with how and why “Hound Dog” has been responded to in particular ways by previous critics, commentators, and musicians. He succinctly nails the arguments and assumptions of those who have grappled to unravel the mysteries of “Hound Dog” in particular, and of rock and roll more generally.
It says something about Weisbard’s intellectual generosity that he even credits the prurient, relentlessly hostile, and (rightly) oft-excoriated biographer Albert Goldman for at least appreciating that early rock and roll was in part a takeoff and a takedown of what passed for mainstream Tin Pan Alley popular music. There was a comedic, tongue-in-cheek contrariness to much of 1950s rock and roll that coexisted with and helped to amplify a more traditionally celebrated “rebelliousness” that was anchored, for young white fans at least, to notions of racial, class, and sexual transgression. This seems very much on the money. Presley’s playfulness in concert, on television, and in some of his better films, even during the Hollywood schlock-and-roll years, showcased underappreciated ludic talents. Presley’s long hours in the studio attempting to capture the sound and feel he imagined built on, yet ultimately transcended, perhaps even partially erased, his earlier and later live versions of the song. In concert, Presley tended to fall back on the comedic undercurrents of a song whose lyrics, which awkwardly transposed a mix of Thornton’s feisty original and the Bellboys’ cutup, made little sense to him. But then, as Weisbard and Presley recognize, the emotional charge of “Hound Dog,” like the punch of much rock and roll, seldom depends on lyrical coherence alone. Indeed, in some of the most evocative writing in the book, Weisbard riffs on Alice Walker’s 1981 short story “Nineteen Fifty-Five,” in which a Presley-esque figure repeatedly seeks out a Thornton-esque singer hoping to discover the secret power of a song he refashions from her template. Similarly, Presley took home a test pressing of his own recording of “Hound Dog” and spent hours listening to it, trying to comprehend the magic he and his fellow musicians had conjured in RCA’s studio.
Weisbard covers much ground in relatively few pages. There is a Marcusian (Greil, emphatically not Herbert) quality to the writing. He sees connections and parallels everywhere and it is fun to take the ride with him. As part of an ongoing meditation about dogs on wax, we get a partial rehabilitation of Patti Page’s “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window,” traditionally pilloried as the exemplification of everything trite and formulaic that rock and roll destroyed. Again, Weisbard reminds us to beware reductive clichés: there is more to that waggly tail than one might imagine. We also get a chapter on legacies, where Weisbard rattles through the impact of the song, and of the young Presley with whom it becomes almost synonymous in this section of the book, on musicians from John Lennon, through Bruce Springsteen, to rapper DMX.
The book’s short-form format is not always conducive to full-blown exposition of some themes and subthemes. Perhaps this is most evident in a truncated account of how African American audiences responded to Elvis and his version of “Hound Dog.” The rock-and-roll explosion hit at precisely the moment when many black youngsters were caught up in the guarded optimism of the early civil rights movement. Rock and roll’s challenge to industry and social assumptions about what kinds of music might sell to which racial demographics was coincident with and connected to mounting challenges to similarly powerful racialized structures in US society. In this context, it would have helped further unpick the political and social valency of “Hound Dog” to linger longer on the popularity of Presley’s recording – and of the singer more generally – with young black audiences in the late 1950s and early 1960s. With twenty-four hits on the rhythm-and-blues charts between 1956 and 1963, Presley’s routinely underappreciated success with black audiences was both extraordinary and yet symptomatic of an era of reverse crossover when many white rock-and-roll-cum-pop acts enjoyed huge popularity with young black record buyers. That fleeting phenomenon is still not fully reckoned with in most histories of US popular music. It was an era that Presley’s recordings, “Hound Dog” among them, helped to usher in and soundtrack.
Ultimately, however, there is much to admire in Weisbard’s work – and it is not always a bad thing when a book leaves the reader baying for more.
