Latest Release
- 23 APR 2024
- 6 Songs
- Roots of Rock & Roll · 2024
- Roots of Rock & Roll · 2024
- Roots of Rock & Roll · 2023
- Classic Blues Live! · 2022
- Sassy Mama - Live at the Rising Sun Celebrity Jazz Club (2022 Remaster) · 2022
- If I Have to Wreck L.A. - Kent & Modern Records Blues into the 60s Vol. 2 · 2020
- Roots of Rock & Roll · 2020
- Bad Bad Girls, Vol. 4: Mean Women Sing · 2015
- Ain't Gonna Hush: The Queens of Rhythm & Blues · 2015
- American Blues Scene 1960s · 2013
Essential Albums
Artist Playlists
- An unsung icon with a fierce growl and gospel-inspired delivery.
Singles & EPs
- 2014
About Big Mama Thornton
Big Mama Thornton was a vibrant rhythm & blues shouter whose trademark growl was a major influence on generations of R&B and rock artists. While she never crossed over to the pop charts, two of her signature songs would become well known to rock fans -- she recorded "Hound Dog" four years before Elvis Presley had a hit with the tune, and she wrote "Ball & Chain," which Janis Joplin performed on Big Brother & the Holding Company's 1968 album Cheap Thrills. Thornton recorded well into the '70s and performed into the '80s, delivering her impassioned version of the blues -- gritty but swinging, and perfect for a rowdy Saturday night -- into the last years of her life. Her superb early singles are collected on the 1992 set Hound Dog: The Peacock Recordings, and 1966's In Europe is drawn from recordings of the American Folk Blues Festival tour of 1965.
- HOMETOWN
- Ariton, AL, United States
- BORN
- 11 December 1926
- GENRE
- Blues