In a few weeks Wanda Jackson will learn if she’s among next year’s inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. For New York author and rock journalist Holly George-Warren, coproducer of a forthcoming tribute CD to Jackson, that’s not a moment too soon. In 2001 she visited the hall to give a reading from her new illustrated children’s book, Shake, Rattle & Roll: The Founders of Rock & Roll, for an audience of inner-city fifth graders. The kids didn’t know who Jackson was and hadn’t heard her music, but George-Warren says that when she cued up the singer’s 1960 hit “Let’s Have a Party” they “totally went nuts–they were up dancing, jumping around.”
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It’s not just schoolchildren who think Jackson belongs alongside Presley and Penniman. George-Warren and Rob Miller, co-owner of the local Bloodshot label, have spent the past two years putting together the compilation Hard-Headed Woman: A Celebration of Wanda Jackson, which aims to draw attention to her rich and varied discography, enormous musical influence, and pioneering role as a female rock ‘n’ roller. Bloodshot will formally release the record on October 26, but it’ll get an unofficial launch party this week when Jackson headlines Martyrs’ on September 23 as part of the second annual Estrojam festival (see Fairs & Festivals). She’ll be backed by a band featuring Jimmy Sutton, Kelly Hogan, and Nora O’Connor, all of whom have contributed to the CD.
Jackson was born in Maud, Oklahoma, in 1937, and her father, an amateur country singer, put a guitar in her hands before she could walk. By age 15 she was singing on her own radio show in Oklahoma City, where country star Hank Thompson discovered her. By the time she graduated from high school she’d had a hit with Thompson’s bandleader, Bill Gray, and landed a contract with Decca Records. “But I didn’t try my hand at rockabilly until Elvis talked me into it and I got the nerve to do it,” she says. “I realized no one was writing that type of song for women.”
For many years Jackson’s reputation was tended principally by rockabilly fetishists and devoted collectors. But then Texas roots revivalist Rosie Flores, who’d convinced Jackson to sing with her for a couple songs on the 1995 album Rockabilly Filly, took the erstwhile First Lady of Rockabilly on tour–her first secular shows in the States since the 70s. Jackson got such a warm reception that she made a full-time return to the road. Meanwhile the Ace and Bear Family labels reissued much of her early material, and in 2003 she released both a concert album, The Wanda Jackson Show: Live and Still Kickin’ (DCN), and a new studio collection, Heart Trouble (CMH), with contributions from the likes of Elvis Costello, Dave Alvin, and the Cramps. “Wanda, along with some other really influential women, are finally getting their due,” says George-Warren. “But that’s endemic to the whole boys’-club aspect of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s only in the past few years that rock historians have gone back and reexamined that.”
