Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters

Finalist, 2024 Lesbian Memoir/Biography, Lambda Literary Award for Arts and Culture
Winner Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award, 45th Annual American Book Awards, Before Columbus Foundation

A queer, Black biography in essays about the performer who gave us Hound Dog, Ball and Chain, and other songs that changed the course of American music.

Born in Alabama in 1926, raised in the church, appropriated by white performers, buried in an indigents graveWillie Mae Big Mama Thornton's life events epitomize the bluesbut Lynnée Denise pushes past the stereotypes to read Thorntons life through a Black, queer, feminist lens and reveal an artist who was an innovator across her four-decade-long career.

Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters samples elements of Thorntons artand, occasionally, the authors own storyto create a biography in essays that explores the life of its subject as a DJ might dig through a crate of records. Denise connects Thorntons vaudevillesque performances in Sammy Greens Hot Harlem Revue to the vocal improvisations that made Hound Dog a hit for Peacock Records (and later for Elvis Presley), injecting music criticism into whats often framed as a cautionary tale of record-industry racism. She interprets Thorntons performing in mens suits as both a sly, Little Richardlike queering of the Chitlin Circuit and a simple preference for pants over dresses that didnt have a pocket for her harmonica. Most radical of all, she refers to her subject by her given name rather than Big Mama, a nickname bestowed upon her by a white man. It's a deliberate and crucial act of reclamation, because in the name of Willie Mae Thornton is the sound of Black musical resilience.