In the low-lit juke where blues crawl thick—
thick as gospel, thick as grit—
Big Mama sits, hands heavy on the frets of time,
plucking the black strings of her own life.
Pressed down, like cotton in the fields,
or a note pulled long and slow as a woman’s moan.
Children, she says, they always come back.
I fed them blues in their bones, in their bread,
gave them the howl that echoes down the alley.
The boy—oh, he sang Hound Dog like it was his own,
shaking hips, golden and sharp in his fine clothes.
But that growl, that swing? That was mine,
born in the backwaters, in the deep dark
where my voice rumbled first, heavy as a storm.
He took it, ran fast into the white lights,
made the world hear it with a sneer and a snap.
But the bark he gave—that howl he tossed—
it was born from my throat, from my growl, my bite.
And the girl, the wild one—oh, she knew pain,
wrapped Ball and Chain around her gravel-cracked voice,
dragged my song through fire, through smoke,
tore herself open, let my blues pour through her.
She screamed my ache for the world to drink,
burned it down their throats like hard whiskey.
But that voice, those shattered notes she clung to—
they were carved from the same stone I broke,
each night I sang it raw, night after endless night.
Mama Thornton sits, as heavy as the blues that birthed them,
the boy with his hips, the girl with her flame.
They took the world like thunder in the night,
but Mama’s beat still pounds below it all,
slow and deep as the earth’s wide breath,
a sound too strong, too wild to fade away.
