How a Nashville actor and gospel singer is paying homage to Big Mama Thornton in the film Elvis

When the director of the new Elvis movie, Baz Luhrmann, pulled together a group of Nashville gospel singers to serve as a choir in the film, it was only natural that Shonka Dukureh would be in that group. She’s been singing in Nashville churches since she was a small child and is known as one of the best in town.

Dukureh showed up to the shoot in a Lebanon church along with about fifty others. After she gave her usual, soulful performance she thought she was done. Little did she know she’d just earned a role in a major motion picture.

WPLN’s Nina Cardona recently got a chance to talk to Dukureh about her experience playing the woman whose signature song “Hound Dog” became one of Elvis Presley’s first big hits.

Dukureh says the news came via email about a year after that first recording session — and about a week before Christmas.

“I thought it was the best Christmas present I had ever received,” she recalls, saying she was thrilled to be flying to Australia for the shoot, but also to portray a woman who played a pivotal role in the development of American music.

“She is a tower of a woman in stature, but she’s also just as towering in her talent, in her confidence, in her presence on recordings. You could just hear her strength. She is one of a kind and you won’t forget her if she’s in a room.”

Big Mama Thornton’s version of “Hound Dog” spent weeks on the top of the R&B charts several years before Elvis made the song one of his first big hits. Dukureh’s performance captures the difference in character between Thorton’s and Presley’s performances of it. Like Thornton, she’s singing it as a woman who is done putting up with a cheating lover. Dukureh says she tried to learn as much as she could about Thornton’s musical approach, and she found a lot of echoes of her own experience. They’re both homegrown, self-taught singers.

“I knew to really pay tribute to her, I had to tap into myself, my own self-confidence, my own voice, because she was very adamant that she only had her voice: No one could sing like her and she sang like no one. So I had to also embrace that approach to music. I didn’t try to sing it like her, but I knew I needed to definitely sing it in a way that she would give me a hand clap, in a sense.”

Dukureh shot her scene, returned to Nashville, and once again thought she was done with her Elvis movie experience. But then, after another two years had gone by, she got another call. This time it was director Baz Luhrman with word that part of her performance would be included in a Doja Cat single to be released along with the movie.

That’s how she ended up on stage at this year’s Coachella music festival, in a custom-made costume emblazoned with her name in giant letters: SHONKA.

“Somebody asked, ‘Are you nervous? It’s like 70,000 people out there.’ I said, ‘I have come too far now to be nervous because it’s showtime now! I can’t turn around!’”

courtesy Shonka Dukureh

Dukureh, a mainstay of gospel music in Nashville, is working now on an album of blues music.

For her next project, Dukureh is working on an album that nods to another great singer of the ’50s, Billie Holiday. But Shonka Dukureh’s use of the title “Lady Sings the Blues” is also a straightforward statement of what she’s doing on it.

“I wanted to acknowledge that it is me, as a woman, singing the blues. I think women have a different approach to the blues. I’m definitely going to bring my gospel background, and I’m going to pay tribute to this genre that has been foundational for all of those other genres to kind of build upon.”

And just like she did in the film, while Dukureh says she’s excited to honoring the work of singers who she admires, she’ll be sure to make every song on the album her own, too.