[4] According to New York University music professor Maureen Mahon, "the song is seen as an important beginning of rock-and-roll, especially in its use of the guitar as the key instrument".

Though later recordings of her songs by other artists sold millions of copies, she was denied royalties by not holding the publishing copyrights to her creativity.

Thornton died of a heart attack and liver disorders, penniless in a boarding-house in Los Angeles, California, and was buried in a shared pauper's grave.

[12] Observing the rhythm-and-blues singers Bessie Smith and Memphis Minnie, whom she deeply admired, helped develop her singing talent.

I was a young type of youngster always running around the house humming the blues and my daddy wanted to get me with the razor strop, but I hit the door".

Diamond Teeth Mary, the half-sister of one of her early idols Bessie Smith, encouraged her to enter a talent contest after having heard Thornton singing while working a side-job on a garbage truck.

[16][17] Thornton described the audition during a 1970 Studs Terkel radio interview, saying "Show came through in the first of the '40s and called it 'Sammy Green's Hot Harlem Revue' as I mentioned earlier.

Thornton moved to the Bronze Peacock Dinner Club which was owned by impresario and record producer Don Robey.

The pair were present at the recording,[21] with Leiber demonstrating the song in the vocal style they had envisioned;[22][23] Stoller said "We wanted her to growl it."

"I was going to the theater and I just turned the radio on in the car and the man said, 'Here's a record that's going nationwide: "Hound Dog" by Willie Mae Thornton'.

[28] Thornton's success with "Hound Dog" was overshadowed three years later when Elvis Presley recorded a hit version of the song.

[21] Presley, who did have knowledge of Thornton's recording of the song,[29] later heard a sanitized version of "Hound Dog" performed by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, while attending their show at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.

[30] Presley's version sold ten million copies, so today few people know that "Hound Dog" began as Thornton's "anthem of black Women's power".

Chris Strachwitz said when Thornton was booked to perform in a good venue like the Fillmore, her manager at the time, Jim Moore, would hire "lounge musicians.

After hearing Thornton perform the song at the Both/And Club on Divisadero Street in San Francisco,[34] Big Brother and the Holding Company's vocalist Janis Joplin and guitarist James Gurley approached her and asked permission to cover "Ball And Chain".

[9] It featured backing by blues veterans Buddy Guy (guitar), Fred Below (drums), Eddie Boyd (keyboards), Jimmy Lee Robinson (bass), and Walter "Shakey" Horton (harmonica),[9] except for two songs (and a third as a bonus track on the 2005 CD reissue) on which Fred McDowell provided acoustic slide guitar.

[40] Music producer Chris Strachwitz said "Willie Mae ‘Big Mama’ Thornton is in my opinion the greatest female blues singer of this and any other decade" in the album's liner notes.

While at home the offers became fewer and smaller, things changed for good in 1972, when Thornton was asked to rejoin the American Folk Blues Festival tour.

She was backed by a blues ensemble that featured sustained jams by George "Harmonica" Smith and included the guitarists Doug MacLeod, Bee Houston and Steve Wachsman, the drummer Todd Nelson, saxophonist Bill Potter, bassist Bruce Sieverson, and pianist J. D. Nicholson.

She toured extensively through the United States and Canada, played at the Juneteenth Blues Fest in Houston, sharing the bill with John Lee Hooker.

Thornton also performed in the "Blues Is a Woman" concert that year, alongside Sippie Wallace, sporting a man's three-piece suit, straw hat, and gold watch.

She was a guest on an ABC-TV special hosted by actor Hal Holbrook and was joined by Aretha Franklin and toured through the club scene.

Her pauper's grave features a small granite marker with two additional names, indicating her body was buried along with two strangers.

She was given her nickname, "Big Mama," by Frank Schiffman, the manager of Harlem's Apollo Theater, because of her strong voice, size, and personality.

[25] Thornton was quoted in a 1980 article in The New York Times: "when I was comin' up, listening to Bessie Smith and all, they sung from their heart and soul and expressed themselves.

[46] Scholar Tyina Steptoe has written that Thornton's gender nonconformity helped to establish rock 'n' roll as a rebellious form of music.

[47] Music historian Evelyn McDonnell remarked "If you go back and look at Bessie Smith, Big Mama Thornton — they were not publicly identifying themselves as queer, necessarily, but clearly signaling in their lyrics and dressing in suits".

[49] Thornton subsequently received greater recognition for her popular songs, but she is still under appreciated for her influence on the blues, rock and roll and soul music.

[25][50] Scholars suggest that Thornton's lack of access to broader audiences (both white and black), may have been a barrier to her commercial success as both a vocalist and a composer.

Presley (played by Austin Butler) hears Thornton sing "Hound Dog" at a concert and decides to record a cover of the song.