One of the favorite arguments of the anti-Elvis cadre is that one of his most memorable recordings,
Hound Dog, was 'stolen' from Big Mama Thornton, an incredibly talented black blues singer who recorded her sultry, simmering version in 1953. Contrary to popular belief,
Hound Dog was not some long-lost song of the back bayou, but a
Lieber and Stoller composition. So, technically, if you follow this line, both Elvis and Big Mama Thornton 'stole' the song from two white, New York Jews. For shame!
I can't remember a time when covering a recording by another artist was considered 'stealing' -- this would mean that when Blind Willie McTell recorded
Dying Crapshooter's Blues he was maliciously stealing (the white) Irving Mills's
St. James Infirmary. For that matter, both the American white Mills and the American black McTell 'stole' the song from the old British folk ballad
The Unfortunate Rake, popular in the late 1700s.
This argument falls apart upon even a cursory investigation, and with it the entire 'Elvis stole the black man's sound' argument put forth by Mos Def, Chuck D., and hundreds of guilty white hippies over the last fifty years. There is no 'stealing' in terms of folk music: the stew of racial, social, and (most importantly) aural traditions that constitutes American roots music cannot be reduced to simple black and white, moralistic terms.
[
Jackie Wilson : 'A lot of people have accused Elvis of stealing the black man's music, when in fact, almost every black solo entertainer copied his stage mannerisms from Elvis'.]
Asked to characterize his singing style when he first presented himself for an audition at the Sun recording studio in Memphis, Elvis said that he sang all kinds of music - '
I don't sound like nobody'. This, as it turned out, was far more than the bravado of an 18-year-old who had never sung in public before. It was in fact as succinct a definition as one might get of the democratic vision that fueled his music, a vision that denied distinctions of race, of class, of category, that embraced every kind of music equally, from the highest up to the lowest down.
