You Ain't Nothin' but a Hound Dog

Hey, everybody!

Yesterday, I got to help the students in Mrs. Naylor’s class understand the concept of comparing and contrasting. As we know, comparing is when you take two characters, books, songs, etc.  and figure out which things are the same in both things. Contrasting, on the other hand, is taking those subjects and finding the differences in between them.

In order to get this idea across, I had them compare and contrast Elvis Presley, and Big Mama Thornton in their renditions of “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog.”

First, I read to them a biography about Elvis called “Elvis: the Story of the Rock ‘N’ Roll King.” Some of the students didn't know who Elvis was, and a lot of them didn't know any of his background. We learned tons of cool facts about him!




We then got to watch the King of Rock 'N' Roll's classic version of "You Ain't Nothin' but a Hound Dog."

Watching Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show singing "Hound Dog"
Watch his video by clicking here.

 While we watched, we came up with adjectives to describe the way he sang, the way he moved, and the set around him.


Some of the ways they described this video were: "His dance moves are twitchy." "People are clapping in the background." "He sings the same phrase over and over again."










Next, I enlightened them about Willie May Thornton, who was known as "Big Mama Thornton." Big Mama was actually the woman who wrote Hound Dog several years earlier. We watched her video of it, and wrote down our observations on that, too.

Watching Big Mama Thornton's video of "Hound Dog"
Watch her video by clicking here.

She was described as having a, "big, loud voice," a "changing voice" (which I told them was her improvising, or making it up as she went), and "groovy." Indeed, this version was much, much different than Elvis Presley's version.














After watching both of these videos, we made a chart to combine what we knew about both of these versions of "Hound Dog" to compare and to contrast them.

We came up with so many differences and commonalities between the two. At one point, the class was torn about which singer was more "groovy." We fixed this problem by coming up with synonyms where each would describe each singer more perfectly than "groovy."

THEN, we had some REAL fun!

A lot of kids noticed a bunch of instruments in the room as they came back in from recess. Some asked, "what are a bunch of violins doing here??" And, I said, "my friends, these are ukulele's."

Each student picked up a ukulele, and I began teaching them the chords for Elvis's "Hound Dog."


I showed them three chords: C, F, and G7. And then we jammed.










Here is that video:

So much fun was had this week! Thanks for reading.

--Bianca Newkirk