‘Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters’

Join DJ and writer Lynnée Denise in a public conversation and listening session with Zezi Ifore discussing Denise’s soon-to-be-released debut book, Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters.

The conversation is part of the Brixton Harlem Festival and will highlight the long-standing cultural conversation between Black Britain and Black America through an exploration of several themes in the author’s biography of the legendary blues singer who recorded her first album at the UK's famed Wessex Sound Studios.

A queer, Black "biography in essays" about the performer who gave us "Hound Dog," "Ball and Chain," and other songs that changed the course of American music. Born in Alabama in 1926, raised in the church, appropriated by white performers, buried in an indigent's grave-Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton's life events epitomize the blues-but Lynnée Denise pushes past the stereotypes to read Thornton's life through a Black, queer, feminist lens and reveal an artist who was an innovator across her four-decade-long career.

Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters "samples" elements of Thornton's art-and, occasionally, the author's own story-to create "a biography in essays" that explores the life of its subject as a DJ might dig through a crate of records. Denise connects Thornton's vaudevillesque performances in Sammy Green's Hot Harlem Revue to the vocal improvisations that made "Hound Dog" a hit for Peacock Records (and later for Elvis Presley), injecting music criticism into what's often framed as a cautionary tale of record-industry racism.

She interprets Thornton's performing in men's suits as both a sly, Little Richard-like queering of the Chitlin Circuit and a simple preference for pants over dresses that didn't have a pocket for her harmonica. Most radical of all, she refers to her subject by her given name rather than "Big Mama," a nickname bestowed upon her by a white man. It's a deliberate and crucial act of reclamation, because in the name of Willie Mae Thornton is the sound of Black musical resilience. CPSIA choking or other US hazard warning.