Snoopin’ round my door; crying all the time

You ain’t nothing but a hound dog
Crying all the time.
You ain’t nothing but a hound dog
Crying all the time.
Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit
And you ain’t no friend of mine.

The señor and I came out of sleep and into the weekend arguing, as is our habit, about metaphors.  Our focus in this case — and I cannot remember why (perhaps the part of the conversation that began while I was still asleep) — was on Elvis Presley’s recording of “Hound Dog”.  Recalling early hearings of it in early childhood, the señor claimed the song to be, most likely, about a disappointing dog.  Then why, said I, would the singer tell a dog that it had previously appeared “high class”?  Maybe, said the señor, it had been sold him as a top show dog, or hunting dog, since rabbits were mentioned.

I stuck, metaphorically, to my point, and claimed the song was directed at a person.  Why though, if it were a song of disappointed love, would the singer address his let-down of a lover as a “hound dog”?  Did he want to call her a bitch?  Was he in fact speaking to a friend (but again, the problem of “high class”)?  It sounded, I said, as if the song had been originally sung by a woman addressed to a man, and had got appropriated for the use of Elvis.  The point after all, we agreed, was that Elvis rock it, not that the lyrics be particularly illuminating or penetrating.

Since ours is a Love 2.0, we asked the tubes: I to my netbook and he to his iPhone.  The trail was quickly revealed, thanks to Wikipedia.

Elvis in April or May 1956 heard the song performed in Vegas by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, whose lead singer gave him permission to include it — as a comic closer — in his own performances, using the lyrics and some of the movements of Bell.  Bell and his band had recorded the song the previous year, after rewriting the original lyrics at the suggestion of Bernie Lowe, for whose label they were making singles.  The rewritten lyrics were intended to broaden the song’s radio appeal.

In April 1953, five different country-style versions of the song with its original lyrics had been recorded, following its release, the previous month, on Peacock Records, performed by Big Mama Thornton.  Thornton’s 1952 recording had been produced by the song’s authors, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.  As a twelve-bar blues, it was an R&B number-one single.

And at the point of Thornton’s performance, it all becomes clear.  The song is addressed to the lover the singer is trying to jilt.  Her points of frustration are clear: this main is a moocher, a shyster, from whom she needs to disentangle her time.  Thornton’s delivery is imperious but sassy, the kind of indirect storytelling that brings in one’s friends and neighbours to shoo the interloper off the premises.  Sometimes lovers come back, and are duds (even as late as 1965, the time of the performance below).  What are you going to do?

You ain’t nothing but a hound dog
Been snoopin’ round my door
You ain’t nothing but a hound dog
Been snoopin’ round my door
You can wag your tail
But I ain’t gonna feed you no more

So what’s the point?  Something like this: that the señor and I were both right, about the song’s underlying metaphors, and their flattening out to the point of death by the time of Elvis’s performance.  Both singers performed with barking and howling noises, but the weighting was different.  ”Hound Dog” carried Elvis’s new celebrity, his notoriety, his threat to propriety; the dangerous dog was, in effect, he.  Thornton makes barking noises and finishes the song where she started, but Elvis goes out on a shouting, gyrating, end-note, the song an augmentation of what began before it.  If my preference is for Thornton’s performance, that also recognises that, in Elvis’s case, the song is not the point.