Loud Fast Lady with Wanda Jackson

Loud Fast Lady talks old friends and new fans with the rockabilly queen

By Beverly Bryan
Published: May 12th, 2009 | 7:00am

If Wanda Jackson was one of the less-familiar names on this year’s list of Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame inductees, it’s not because she never stood out. If anything, she stood out too much for her moment: During a time when poofy frocks were all the rage, Jackson's sexy growl, hot guitar, and wardrobe of high heels and silk fringe–laden sheaths put her just a few years ahead of the cultural curve of the mid-‘50s.

Inducted into the Hall under the catch-all “early influence” category at the urging of many (including 1993 inductee Elvis Costello), the rockabilly OG could not be more gratified by this year’s acceptance. “It just means a whole lot to me, because I’m there now with my other friends — with Elvis and Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash that have passed on. We were all there together in the very beginning. Those were the people I worked shows with,” she reminisces. Jackson was one of the first women to sing rocknroll. Tightly wound rockabilly numbers like “Mean Mean Man” and “Riot In Cellblock # 9” assured her place in rock history, while more contemporary efforts — like 2003’s Heart Trouble (on which she revamped songs with backup from fans like Costello and the Cramps) — testify to a body of work that’s still exciting, as well as influential.

Jackson got her start playing country music as a teenager, and she shared the bill with Elvis Presley on her first tours in ‘55 and ‘56. The two dated briefly, but remained friends afterward; Presley was the one to convince the young country singer to try her guitar-strumming hand at rockabilly. “Seeing all the enthusiasm from the audience — in these young people — that that music created, I wanted to be a part of it. But I hadn’t given it much thought because I was strictly singing country,” she says. Presley extracted a pledge that Jackson would give it a shot, “I kept my promise, and when I did, I found I had sounds in me I’d never heard,” she says. No one was writing rock songs for women, so she wrote her own and, like her peers, adapted blues and country numbers and played many covers. A stylistic breakthrough came when she remade blues singer Ernestine Williams’ song, “Fujiyama Mama.” “When I started recording it,” Jackson recalls, “these wild sounds came out of me and that kind of set my style.”

Wild sounds were another thing not yet in fashion — not for young ladies packaged as country singers, at least. “The mindset of America was totally different. They wanted to keep the girls in one pigeonhole and the guys in the other — they wanted country music in this pigeonhole, but the lines began to get blurred,” she says of the nascent record industry. It was often hard to get her rockabilly numbers on the radio, so she would record a rocker on one side of a single and a country song on the other; the country song would garner the vital airplay. Her first rock song to crack the Top 40 was a recording of Presley’s “Let’s Have a Party” in 1960.

At least she wasn’t getting any complaints from her audiences. “When I’d do these songs in person, I’d say, ‘This is my new record,’ and I’d do the country song and say, ‘Here’s what’s on the other side of it,’ and they just loved it! Anybody who liked country liked this new rocknroll. If they liked one, they automatically liked the other,” she explains. Jackson says the main difference between rockabilly and country was “attitude” — a big part of what Presley told Jackson he saw in her. “Even as I sang country, I was still real feisty,” she declares, “I moved around a lot, I played the guitar in those dresses that moved real easily, I kept the fringes going.”

Jackson slipped off the mainstream radar for some time, but she never left music. She and her husband became Christians in the early ‘70s, and Jackson only recorded gospel until ‘85, when she was invited to Sweden to record a rock album and put on a three-week tour. In the midst of that experience, she discovered fans worldwide still carried a torch for her early recordings. “They were asking for songs that I hadn’t been singing in years. I had to go back and relearn them,” she says, bemused.

Now, at 71 years of age, she still keeps those fringes going, touring the U.S. and Europe, with occasional trips to Australia and Japan. Her shows always include gospel, country, and rock. “I’ve always enjoyed doing all three of those and I think they’re kind of like first cousins; they just kind of flow together,” she says, adding, “This man in Scandinavia (when I first got back into secular music), he said, ‘I don’t know what to call your show. I think it’s just going to be The Happy Wanda Jackson Country Gospel Rockabilly Show.’ And that’s what he billed it as.” Thus, after more than 50 years in the business, Jackson remains what she was in the beginning: a woman who innately resists categorization.

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Wanda Jackson I Remember Elvis review

Wanda Jackson official site

Wanda Jackson MySpace

"Loud Fast Lady" is a monthly column featuring women in aggressive, loud, or fast music. Atlanta-based writer Beverly Bryan, the mastermind behind "Loud Fast Lady," falls in love with a new loud, fast lady just about every day.