Lulu truly wanted to imitate Big Mama Thornton “rather than being called the pop princess”
Having risen to fame as a 15-year-old with her rendition of the Isley Brothers’ ‘Shout’, Lulu was an instant sensation, going on to host television programmes, venture into Hollywood and record an expansive discography.
When ‘Shout’ was released in 1964, the song caught the attention of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who, appearing on the music programme Ready Steady Go!, expressed that Lulu’s song was their favourite record of the week. “That blew my goddamn mind,” Lulu reflected to Uncut in 2024. “But they liked the same music as me. We were into Black American music: Motown, R&B, the blues, gospel.”
Lulu agreed that it was her love of these genres that prompted her to travel to the United States in the late 1960s to record her two albums, New Routes and Melody Fair, and there, she worked with Duane Allman of the Allman Brothers Band, singer-songwriter Dr John and jazz guitarist Cornell Dupree, alongside the likes of the prolific session group The Dixie Flyers and the duo The Memphis Horns.
But, Lulu struggled with the songs she was offered, as she explained, “Maybe because we didn’t have enough great songs…”
“I don’t think the producers really understood me”.
Lulu
New Routes was recorded at Muscle Shoals Studios in Alabama, and would be Lulu’s debut for Atco Records, the label whose signing of her in 1969 was aided by her engagement to Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees, one of Atco’s top artists. The album, in turn, opens with a Bee Gees song, ‘Marley Purt Drive’, and a Barry Gibb-written song, ‘In the Morning’.
From New Routes came a Top 30 hit single in ‘Oh Me Oh My (I’m a Fool for You Baby)’, written originally by Jim Doris and later remade by Aretha Franklin, Ronnie Spector, Buster Poindexter and more. “I don’t think they knew what to do with me,” Lulu emphasised of her producers, quoted in Karen Bartlett’s 2014 book, Dusty: An Intimate Portrait of a Musical Legend, “And the only big hit I got [off the album] was a song that I [brought in] with me.”
New Routes was not commercially successful, but this did not hinder Lulu’s production team – Tom Dowd, Arif Mardin and Jerry Wexler – from having Lulu record her follow-up album with virtually the same assemblage of musicians. This time, however, Lulu and her team were recording in Miami’s Criteria Studios in March of 1970. Melody Fair also did not gain major traction on the charts, with its advance single ‘Hum a Song (From Your Heart)’ peaking at number 54 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and falling short of the UK Top 50. Lulu’s subsequent singles were largely overlooked, and Lulu felt increasingly misunderstood by her collaborators.
Still undeterred, however, Lulu found a champion in David Bowie, whom she met a few years later. “He said, ‘The record companies don’t get you, Lu. And they don’t get your voice either’,” Lulu recalled. Bowie’s empathy inspired Lulu to acknowledge her true desire for the direction of her music, as she shared, “I aspired to be like Big Mama Thornton rather than being called the pop princess of Saturday night TV.”
With Thornton’s undeniable influence on the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, as her powerful voice and performance style on-stage came to define the early stylings of blues and rock music, Lulu’s personal taste in music was indebted to the singer-songwriter’s impact. ‘Hound Dog’, made famous by Elvis Presley in 1956, was written for Thornton and recorded four years before, while her original song, ‘Ball and Chain’, would later be performed by Janis Joplin in the late 1960s.
While she was severely underappreciated for her contributions to music, Thornton’s legacy stands as a pillar of popular music, past and present.
