Coincidence made the patterns of their lives prior to meeting strikingly similar. They were born within two months of each other in 1933, Leiber in Baltimore and Stoller in Long Island. They both grew up in working-class Jewish families, in neighborhoods that exposed them to black culture. Both families moved to Los Angeles in 1950.
Stoller enrolled at Los Angeles City College while Leiber went to Fairfax High School. They met through a mutual friend who knew they were both aspiring songwriters. Stoller was wary at first, because he took his theory and principles of composition seriously and everything Leiber had learned about music came from the street. Nevertheless, they hit it off and began writing songs.
Stoller worked in a record store, which gave him the opportunity to meet the store’s suppliers. One such person was Lester Sill, then the national sales manager for the Bihari brothers’ Modern label. (Sill is one of those generation-spanning behind-the-scenes figures who deserves his own profile in this space someday.) The songwriting pair started working for Sill, who introduced them to such Central Avenue luminaries as Maxwell Davis and Johnny Otis. He took them to the east coast and introduced them to Ralph Bass and other industry players on that side of the continent.
The first recorded versions of their songs included “Real Ugly Woman” by Jimmy Witherspoon and “Hard Times” by Charles Brown, both in 1950, and “K.C. Lovin” by Little Willie Littlefield in 1952. (This song evolved into “Kansas City,” the most famous rendition of which is by Wilbur Harrison.)
In 1952, they went to a rehearsal of Johnny Otis’ r&b revue. He was breaking in a new singer, a transplant from Texas (as many of the Los Angeles r&b luminaries were). She was a big woman with bony features and scars named Willie Mae Thornton. They were so awestruck by this imposing figure, they dashed off to the nearest piano and began to think about a tune that would be specifically ideal for Thornton. They put together “Hound Dog” and hurried back to Otis and Thornton with it. The resulting performance was released on Don Robey’s Houston-based Peacock label. This original version of this rock classic was similar to the sentiment expressed by Bessie Smith in “Easy Rider Blues.” Thornton howled and growled and wailed about the freeloading hound dog in her house. Ironically, Elvis Presley got his inspiration to record it three years later from a parody version by a Los Vegas lounge act, so that the Elvis version’s confused lyrical perspective, while made irrelevant by that version’s instant aural and cultural impact, came about in a circuitous way.
