Review Of Elvis Presley's Song 'Hound Dog'

The song that I chose to listen to was “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton and the cover by Elvis Presley. This is a very popular song and I’ve known it for a long time (as it was in the Disney movie Lilo and Stitch), yet I didn’t know until I was reading the textbook this week that Elvis Presley was not the original performer of this song. I really enjoyed listening to Big Mama Thornton sing it. She has a very deep, rich voice. I like that she sang it more smoothly, kind of legato, than Elvis Presley did. She also had a different instrumental sound and made barking sounds at the end. In contrast, Presley’s version is more bouncy and had different styling to make it so that he wasn’t making a complete copy of Big Mama Thornton’s song. In my opinion,
this is really important to making a cover song successful. You can’t perform the song exactly the way that it already is and expect people to fall in love with it. You have to make it your own. At the same time, you still have to give credit to the creator of the song. It baffled me in the article by Garofalo that some people didn’t give credit to the creators of the songs that they covered and tried to claim that they were the composers. That is blatant plagiarism and I’m very glad that people recognized and addressed that. Using inspiration from other performers to create your own rendition of their song has created beautiful music. But, like we can see from the case with Elvis Presley, it can’t create your entire career. Presley did an amazing job covering Thornton’s songs, but if that was the only song he created, he would not have left the legacy that he did. Rather, it was the combination of his cover songs with the many other original songs that he created that has inspired so many people.