Big mama, bigger story
Larger-than-life saga of Willie Mae Thornton lands on the NAC stage
If you were Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, you’d probably wear men’s clothes too. The blues legend who debuted Hound Dog and Ball ‘n’ Chain — the former a hit for Elvis and the latter for Janis Joplin — came of musical age in the mid-twentieth century when female blues singers, like women generally, played second fiddle to their male counterparts, says Jackie Richardson.
Richardson, herself a Canadian jazz legend, plays the larger-thanlife performer in the musical Big Mama! The Willie Mae Thornton Story, at the National Arts Centre.
Not only did Thornton have to battle sexism, she also struggled with a white-dominated music industry, says Richardson.
Producers routinely gave black music to white performers like Elvis and handed artists like Thornton either nothing or a pittance in return — “not even a pension,” says Richardson.
So Big Mama (the name refers to both her robust size and singing voice) fought fire with fire, carving out her own path, including performing in men’s hats, shirts and trousers.
“She chose to be very manly, fight and cuss as hard as the guys,” says Richardson.
“She stood her ground that way. That’s a very hard thing to have to do.”
Richardson, a cast member in Dionne Brand’s play thirsty when it premièred at the NAC in the fall of 2012, first appeared in Big Mama! in a short, lunch box-theatre version of the musical in Calgary a dozen years ago.
That early version was well received and quickly developed into its current, 90-minute incarnation written by Audrei-Kairen and directed by John Cooper. Richardson did a couple of performances of the new version, but then the musical sat dormant for years until she mentioned it to Peter Hinton, former artistic director of NAC English Theatre. He was smitten with the idea, according to Richardson, and programmed it into the current season.
The show, a Belfry Theatre ( Victoria, B.C.) production, is set in a no-name roadhouse on a Christmas Eve in the 1970s. Thornton sings, traces the history of the blues and tells her own, frequently hard-luck life story.
That story includes being born in 1926 in rural Alabama, one of six children of a minister and a mother who died when Thornton was 14. Thornton, who’d grown up singing in the church, was on the road with promoter Sammy Green’s musical troupe Hot Harlem Review by the time she was in her early teens.
Initially billed as “the new Bessie Smith,” she enjoyed reasonable success in music although good times, including gigs with the likes of Muddy Waters and the Grateful Dead, were interspersed with long periods of poverty.
Thornton drank heavily and died of a heart attack in 1984. She was 57.
The blues — music about bad times which, in the singing and listening, paradoxically provides a lift — is what helped Thornton hold things together during her many rough patches, says Richardson.
“Music is the healer. Whatever happens in the day, when you hit the stage you go to another part of your brain and you’re just enjoying it; everything is in sync.”
Richardson believes Thornton developed her famously “crusty” persona as a way of dealing with people. But inside, Richardson thinks there was a big-hearted woman.
“The way she talks about her mother, appreciates her friends … When I look at pictures of her, I get the feeling she was warm and funny, but she had a line, and it was, ‘Don’t cross this line.’ ”
Life on the road, the secondclass status of women and blacks, the drinking: all of it inspired the emotion and empathy Thornton poured into her singing at the same time it helped drive her down.
But, says Richardson, when it came time to perform, “I think she was like Billie Holiday. She turned herself inside out and gave herself to you.”