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ROCKIN WITH WANDA JACKSON Country and Rock’s Queen of Rockabilty
If Elvis was the King of Rock n’ Roll, then Wanda Jackson is surely the Queen. She was there at the beginning, and still carries the flame of real rock 'n' roll with her fiery passion. Her raspy, sexy voice and raw, aggressive music was a revelation in the early '50s — and still is. She can still bring the music to life, at the age of 72 .
This photo was taken on tour during 1957
"I was the first woman to do rockabilly — or rock music in the sense that we know it," Jackson says. "(Elvis) was the one who encouraged me to try it. I didn't think I could. I said, 'I'm just a country singer, that's all I've ever sang in my life.' He said, 'Well, I am too, basically, but kids are buying records now.'"Although she would continue to make strong country records off and on for the next several decades, rock 'n' roll was the music of her generation, and she never looked back.Elvis, apparently, saw some promise in this little firecracker with the jet-black hair. She had a Top 40 hit "Let's Have a Party," but most of her chart success was overseas — Germany, Japan, Scandinavia, where she developed serious followings. She'd often cut a country version and a rockabilly version of the same song, and made the country Top 10 with "Right or Wrong" and "In the Middle of a Heartache."But the fiery, bad-girl image that she projected couldn't have been further from the truth."I guess it was an alter ego or something, I don't know," Jackson says. "But Daddy's advice was 'You sing it the way you want to sing it, don't let anybody change you.' I had few run-ins like with a manager, who thought I should have dressed like all the other girls. The recording people, my producer, didn't really know what to do with me, either.My daddy worked as my manager and traveled with me ... I remember him telling me, 'Remember, you've got to shake the same hands on the way down as on the way up.”
“Before Elvis, it was always the adults who had money and bought the records. As soon as he hit the scene, the young people started buying records, and were becoming more of a voice in our choosing of songs, and how record companies were marketing the songs. Elvis knew this before anybody else did, and that’s why he said ‘If you want to be successful, I feel like you should do this music. I thought it was wonderful that he even cared as much. His career was going huckledy-buck, and exploding right around before his eyes, and yet he was taking time to encourage me.” In the '70s, she and her husband became born-again Christians, and she started exclusively making gospel records. Then, in 1985, she was lured back to rock 'n' roll by fans in Sweden. Eventually, interest returned in the States, too. Another Elvis — Elvis Costello — championed her for admission into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Jackson says now there's a whole new generation of fans showing up at her shows."I feel like I'm in my heyday now, rather than before," she says. "It's a whole new generation — they're all discovering this simple rockabilly music and falling in love with it." And yes, back when they were touring together in the '50s, Jackson did date Elvis, for a time."Well, what we could — it wasn't traditional dating," Jackson says. "We hung out together backstage and would go out together after shows, for a while. Finally, it got real difficult for him to go anywhere after a show. With that pink Cadillac, he couldn't get away."