Professor Pamela Sneed Directs and Stars in 'A Tribute to Big Mama Thornton'
On March 1 and 2, 2024, Adjunct Associate Professor of Visual Arts Pamela Sneed will direct and star in A Tribute to Big Mama Thornton at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater in New York City.
The production, which incorporates live music and text, was written by Sneed as a tribute to Big Mama Thornton, the American blues and R&B singer and songwriter. Thornton, who was born Willie Mae Thornton in Ariton, Alabama in 1926, wrote two of the most iconic songs in Blues history—“Hound Dog” and “Ball and Chain”—and recorded countless others—like “Go Down Moses,” “Down Home Shakedown,” and “Rock Me Baby.” Often, she was the first to record these songs. She recorded and performed “Hound Dog” in 1952, three years before Elvis Presley released his version, for instance. In the early 1960s she wrote “Ball and Chain,” the song that would propel Janis Joplin to the spotlight.
Sneed noted, “It’s not a play, it’s a performance”—an important distinction, and one that pays homage to Big Mama Thornton’s personality, which was hardly containable. Beside bearing a commanding voice—which Sneed, in a recent article in Them Magazine, calls “gravelly and uncommon”—and a remarkable talent with the harmonica, Thornton was also known for her singular presence on and off stage. “She was six-foot tall, and in later years exclusively appeared on stage in a three-piece suit, a big man’s hat, and shoes,” Sneed remarks.
Yet, this physical persona is not the only facet of Thornton’s life that Sneed’s performance will foreground. Sneed’s production seeks “to acknowledge the Black queer roots of rock and roll,” and she does this via a series of interwoven monologues that engage Thornton’s life history with Sneed’s lived experiences. “I am invoking her now to fight against the marginalization of her work from the queer and musical canon and attempted erasures of her voice from the historical records,” Sneed wrote in Them Magazine. “I hope to assert in her absence the importance of her existence and legacy, hers and mine.”
Tickets for A Tribute to Big Mama Thornton are available on The Public Theater’s website or at their box office, located at 425 Lafayette Street.
Pamela Sneed is a New York based poet, performer and visual artist. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams, and Funeral Diva. Funeral Diva won the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award and was featured in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, Art Net and more. In 2021, Sneed was a panelist for The David Zwirner Gallery’s More Life exhibit, and has spoken at Bard Center for Humanities, The Ford Foundation, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, The New School, New York Public Library, The Brooklyn Museum, MOMA, DIA, and NYU’s Center For Humanities. She has published in The Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Art Forum, The Academy of American Poets, The Brooklyn Rail, THEM, BOMB and most recently Poetry Magazine. She has appeared in Nikki Giovanni’s The 100 Best African American Poets. Her visual work has appeared at Ford Foundation, Kates-Ferris, and Laurel Gitlen Gallery in New York City.