A larger-than-life Alabama music legend who had a profound influence on the evolution of rock and roll gets a fresh look in a new film that gives a sense of the spirit behind her stage persona.

“I just like to sing my soul,” Willie Mae Thornton, better known as Big Mama Thornton, is heard to say in a new documentary being presented by Alabama Public Television. “I can’t sing nobody else’s soul.”

“Big Mama Thornton: Alabama Kid” is the latest project from documentary filmmaker Robert Clem, who previously has explored Alabama topics as diverse as Black Belt blues music and Confederate Adm. Raphael Semmes. It follows the career of an iconic singer born in 1926 in Montgomery, who began touring professionally while still in her teens and went on to pave the way for the likes of Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin, and who was posthumously inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2024.

Clem’s hourlong film compactly retells the many ups and downs of Thornton’s career: Highs included having a breakout hit with “Hound Dog,” which Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote for her, and having Joplin turn her own “Ball and Chain” into another hit. Lows included being denied the wealth and security that such succeses should have brought her. She was a woman who was celebrated by European fans and who amazed jazz festival crowds in the late ‘60s, yet who was buried in a pauper’s grave.

What’s particularly fresh here is the wealth of photography, which gives Big Mama Thornton a quality that might often be lost amid the legendry: youth. “Alabama Kid” doesn’t shy away from the fact that Willie Mae Thornton lived a hard life, but it also shows the delight she took in who she was and what she could do even near the end, when age and illness had left her large frame disturbingly gaunt.

“Big Mama Thornton: Alabama Kid” premieres at 8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 23, on Alabama Public Television.