Old Time Rock & Roll

by Jewly Hight

A lot of what may have seemed incendiary about Wanda Jackson in 1956 is tame by 2007 standards. The fact that she sang songs—some of which she wrote—that were an energetic mix of country and rhythm and blues geared toward teenagers instead of adults raises nary an eyebrow 26 years after the advent of MTV. And the radicalness of her stage outfits—fitted, fringe-covered, below-the-knee dresses with sweetheart necklines and spaghetti straps—is lost on those now accustomed to all manner of female flesh-bearing. “What I had in mind was to look real lively but to never be vulgar,” says Jackson. “Nowadays, the women can get by with doing anything. I wanted to be sexy in a ladylike way. I think that’s what I pulled off.”

But it’s no less striking to hear the nearly 70-year-old Oklahoma singer still coaxing a sassy, girlish growl from her vocal cords now as she revisits “Fujiyama Mama”—a 1958 hit for her in Japan. Her voice may sound a tad deeper and slightly less supple, but it’s every bit the formidable vocal instrument that it was in her late teen years. “I think that is partially due to not ever having stopped performing,” she says. “I work 12 months a year—it’s a lot of exercise.”

And it’s not just how, but what, she sings. Even today, the sheer number of not-gonna-take-no-nonsense-from-no-man songs she’s recorded—as playful as “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad” and “My Big Iron Skillet” are—is still noteworthy. “I definitely agree we’re not to be a doormat,” says Jackson. “I always liked those kind of songs…. Once in a while [producer Ken Nelson would] just kind of scratch his head—‘you’re sure you want to do a song like that?’ ”

During a brief window spanning the latter half of the 1950s to the early ’60s, Jackson—and a handful of others, such as Janis Martin and Brenda Lee—occupied the unique position of females performing rockabilly in what was arguably the first generation in American popular music to gleefully uncork their youthful vitality. Ever since interest in rockabilly revived in Europe in the ’80s, Jackson—who’d been doing primarily gospel music—has found herself once again standing in a rare spot.

“There aren’t many of the originals left,” she says. “It makes it nice for those of us that are. Since we did this in ’85—went to Sweden and started back into secular music—I’ve had more publicity than I’ve ever had in my life. This rockabilly stage has come along, and the press that I get, the crowds that I’m drawing—it’s just really unbelievable.”

It doesn’t seem to matter that rockabilly has comprised only two periods of Jackson’s more than half-century career. She started out in straight country, and returned to it when rockabilly’s popularity faded, before a born-again experience drew her to gospel. Not that Jackson’s initial departure from country music was ever all that clear-cut, since her singles often featured rockabilly on one side and country on the other, and “Let’s Have a Party”—her first U.S. rockabilly hit—was more or less tacked onto the end of her 1958 self-titled country debut as an afterthought. A couple of years later, “I Gotta Know”—one-half rollicking jump blues and one-half pedal steel balladry—split the difference right down the middle. “I didn’t ever mean to divorce country music, just like when I started doing gospel I wasn’t divorcing rock ’n’ roll and country,” Jackson says. “But it just seemed like I was to people. If I couldn’t get airplay on the rock side we were hoping maybe at least I could keep my name built up in the country side.”

It’s the feisty, effervescence of songs like “Mean Mean Man” and “Hard Headed Woman”—with their simple, combustible, dance-inciting boogie of upright bass, swinging drums, pre-distortion guitars and Jackson’s kittenish snarling and hiccuping—that she’s most known for. They’re still vital-sounding and—for many contemporary listeners—serve as a bastion of so-called non-mainstream musical purity.

One need look no further than the 2004 Bloodshot tribute, Hard-Headed Woman: A Celebration of Wanda Jackson, featuring contributions from Neko Case and the Bottle Rockets, or Jackson’s Heart Trouble album—with the Cramps backing her on “Funnel of Love” and “Riot In Cellblock No. 9”—to appreciate her counterculture cred.

“Without that connection with rockabilly music right now, I would have been in the same fix as most of the country stars from my era,” Jackson says. “They aren’t recording, they’re hardly working anywhere, and yet here I am at the biggest point of my career that I’ve ever enjoyed. Go figure.”

Much has been made of Jackson’s early association with Elvis Presley, and for good reason—he first encouraged her to dive into rockabilly. “That’s always kind of baffled me,” she says. “He must have seen a playful side of me or something that no one else recognized.” Last year she released I Remember Elvis, a collection of spoken vignettes and songs from Presley’s Sun Records days—the period when she toured with him—captured in a way that approximates the no-frills instrumentation and reverb-drenched vocals of the originals. “I Wore Elvis’ Ring”—obviously not one that Presley recorded—is Jackson’s chance to coyly emphasize the fact that the two singers’ relationship wasn’t only musical. “So many times on a tribute album you just do their songs or something,” she says. “But with the personal connection that I had, it gave [my album] a real purpose for being out there.”

Jackson’s 1971 religious conversion was every bit as transformative of her life and music as knowing Presley was—and then some. For 15 years, she recorded country-gospel albums and sang for church crowds, after which her husband and longtime manager Wendell Goodman would take the microphone and share the story of his own religious conversion. Then the musical seasons changed again.

“The opportunity came to us—I didn’t pursue it; it came to me—to record a secular rockabilly and country album in Sweden,” says Jackson. “After a lot of thought and prayer we decided that we would like to. I was ready to get back into secular music, because I’d been in small churches a lot just working with playback tapes. I was longing for a big stage and live bands and big crowds. And so the Lord just seemed to hand it to me and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.”

Though Jackson’s website bills her as the “Queen of Rockabilly,” her live performances are more varied than ever, giving at least a few moments of attention to the three styles of music that have comprised her lengthy career.

“That was just a stipulation that everybody knew—when you have Wanda Jackson on your show, she is going to say a word about Christ and sing a gospel song,” Jackson says. “And the people do receive it so wonderfully. There’s a real respect and a reverence because I don’t speak long—I just speak very shortly. I always thank the people for allowing me to speak of my beliefs, because it is important to me.

“I felt very fortunate—I still do—that I can do these three major kinds of music and be accepted doing all three of them,” she adds. “In fact, a man in Sweden said, ‘I don’t know how to bill this show that we’re putting together for you.’ He finally came up with the idea of calling it ‘The Happy Wanda Jackson Country Gospel Rockabilly Show.’ It takes a long marquee but it gets it said.”