Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters

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.

A global practitioner of sound, language, and Black Atlantic thought, Lynnée Denise is a London-based writer and interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, California. Shaped by her parent’s record collection and the 1980s, Denise’s work traces and foregrounds the intimacies of underground nightclub movements, music migration, and bass culture in the African Diaspora. She coined the term DJ Scholarship in 2013, which explores how knowledge is gathered, interpreted, and produced through a conceptual and theoretical framework, shifting the role of the DJ from a party purveyor to an archivist and cultural worker. A doctoral student in the Department of Visual Culture at the Goldsmiths University of London, Denise’s research contends with how iterations of sound system culture construct a living archive and refuge for a Black queer diaspora.
Lynnée Denise was the 2022 Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College. In addition, she is the recipient of numerous global residencies and lecturer positions– including at Stanford University, UCLA, and Spelman College– Denise’s artistic interdisciplinary teachings harness music as a medium for critical dialogue and public scholarship on how to transform the way that Black music is understood in its social context and beyond entertainment.

Her work has been featured in various cultural and academic institutions worldwide, including the Tate Modern in London, Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town, Savvy Contemporary Gallery in Berlin, Brown University, Princeton University, and the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. Her literary essays have been published in venues such as Harper’s Bazaar, the Los Angeles Times, Oprah Daily, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Denise is at the helm of many groundbreaking artistic and academic productions, including After the Last Dance, the first and only Michael Jackson conference with The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The School of Prince with the Los Angeles Public Library, and Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace: From Detroit to Watts: the first conference dedicated solely to the musical life of The Queen of Soul with the UCLA African American Studies Department.