The young person/cattle prod who got Jackson moving toward new music - even writing new songs - was Wanda’s granddaughter and new manager, Jordan Simpson. It’s like having a cattle prod around.”ĭiscussing her retirement from touring in 2019 after the 2017 passing of her beloved husband and manager Wendell Goodman, Jackson suggests that she wasn’t quite done with making music, even if she was finished with the road. I surround myself with young people for that reason, for their ideas. You need younger people like Jack and Joan to throw you out of your comfortable place. Jackson goes on to say, “Older people tend to get stuck, like in a rocking chair. I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to live up to what he wanted, but apparently I did so, and then some.”
I learned to jump in and try different things. I didn’t know what was going to happen next with him. In particular, Jackson laughs about working with Jack White on the twangy, tangy “The Party Ain’t Over,” saying, “I just love that guy. “That’s always been the most exciting part, the most challenging part - not knowing what they’re going to bring out of me.” Upon her return, Jackson was keen to work with collaborators who could enhance the energy of who she knew she was, while showing off aspects of herself she hardly knew existed. But it was God’s will for me to come back to that.” Moving backwards, for a moment, to the time in the ’70s and ’80s when she moved into sacred song (“Music is about ministering to people even love songs,” she says), Jackson teases about how people “didn’t know if I was alive or dead until I came back to secular music. Not for me,’ and I’m like, ‘Lady, I’m here to help you.’ But Wanda is very strong, very definite, in what she will do and what she won’t - hat she’ll sing, and what she won’t. “Encore” co-producer Kenny Laguna laughs when recalling their first studio sessions. She is strong, and she knows who she is.” And yet Wanda endured and had a career that lasted decades and influenced so many that came after her. Even the boys, then, were meeting resistance from the mainstream.
Her sound was raw and incredibly soulful. “I know how hard it was for me to negotiate the waters, as a woman in a male-dominated world, so I was in awe, imagining the hurdles that Wanda must have encountered doing her music at the very beginning of rock ‘n’ roll. “Wanda is a unique and original pioneer,” says Jett. If Wanda didn’t call herself a maverick, Joan Jett certainly would.
That me, especially on self-penned songs of the late ’50s such as “Mean Mean Man,” “Baby Loves Him” and “Cool Love,” found a far-ahead-of-her-time Jackson ripe with rude innuendo and aggressive sexuality, to say nothing of her frisky vocals’ rasp.Īt a time in post-WWII America when country and pop were filled with men commanding women to be demure and sing sexlessly - and when the Grand Ole Opry was a model of purity - Wanda Jackson was unceasing in her command of primal rock ‘n’ roll with hyper-passionate sensuality attached (and a band that dared to feature a Black pianist, Big Al Downing, in the segregated South). But that’s what made me me… I was a maverick in that sense.” I crossed the line, and they didn’t know what to do with me. “That’s how I got to rockabilly in the first place, when everyone thought I would exclusively be a country artist – which I was, too.
“There was a time when you had managers, assistants, stylists telling you what to wear and how to wear it, but musically, I had final say,” says Jackson, in a gravelly voice ever-so-slightly roughed-up by Oklahoma City’s allergy season. Make no mistake, however: Wanda Jackson is the boss – soft spoken at 83, yet commanding – and has been since her major label start, making singles for Decca in 1954, then albums for Capitol beginning in 1958, always blending country sides with rockabilly tracks.