Who was/is Wanda Jackson ? - CDs, Vinyl LPs, DVD and more

Wanda Jackson

If not for her good friend Elvis Presley’s sage advice, Wanda Jackson might have stuck with good old-fashioned country music. After all, she’d already scored a sizable hit for Decca in 1954 with You Can’t Have My Love, an appealing traditional country duet with Billy Gray. But The Hillbilly Cat intuitively understood that a new sound was brewing across the South, one he was driving teenage girls crazy with. As he toured with Wanda in 1955, Elvis created bedlam everywhere they played.

Between gigs, he advised Wanda to join him aboard the rockabilly bandwagon, reasoning that her rip-roaring pipes were tailor-made for the incendiary style. Much as Elvis ascended to the throne as the king of rockabilly like a rocket in flight, Wanda would eventually reign as the idiom’s queen. Unlike many of her peers, Wanda didn’t have to deal with disapproval from her parents—they actively encouraged her. Her father, Tom Jackson, was a guitarist and fiddler, while her mother Nellie was just as integral to her career. “The fact that I’m an only child helped a lot,” said Wanda. “They were able to concentrate all of their attention and efforts on me. My career was really a family affair. My mother made my clothes. I designed them, she made them. She was a professional seamstress, so she made almost everything I wore, on and offstage. She could fit me like a glove.

And then my dad gave up his job so he could travel with me, take care of me on the road. So my folks sacrificed their time together, any social life they could have had. They just invested all of their energies in me.” Born October 20, 1937 in Maud, Oklahoma, Wanda was five years old when she and her folks moved to California, first settling in Los Angeles and then outside of Bakersfield. Tom placed a guitar in his daughter’s hands when she was only six. Western swing was the thing on the West Coast, and the Jacksons happily soaked it up. “They loved to dance. They were beautiful dancers,” said Wanda. “In those days, people didn’t get babysitters. If a couple did something, then the children were included. And in these dance halls in California, I remember the dance area was one place, and then they’d have like the beer garden in the other. My mother is a teetotaler, and some of their friends would have drinks. But she’d stay with me. They’d go have their drinks and then come back. “They said I’d stand right in front of the bandstand all night long with my head back, watching and listening from the age of six. People will say, ‘What are you gonna be when you grow up?’ And I’d always say, ‘A girl singer!’ Maybe I thought I had the choice of being the girl or the guy, I don’t know. The girls looked so pretty in the flashy clothes.” Rose Maddox made a strong impression. “She was so feisty, and their music was so good. I sang some of her songs in the early days,” said Wanda. “I liked the girl yodelers.

I liked the Bob Wills band. Just about every Western swing band had at least one girl singer, and most of them were yodelers. That was kind of the thing: if you were gonna be in a band, you had to yodel. So I learned real early how to yodel.” The Jacksons moved back to The Sooner State when Wanda was nine, settling this time in Oklahoma City. An impromptu audition at KLPR radio led to her own radio program when Wanda was 14. “Just 15 minutes, just me and my guitar,” she said. “Every day, after school, I’d go up to the station and do my show. Then my parents would pick me up and go home. Then I’d do my homework.” One day Oklahoma City’s resident country music star Hank Thompson called her at the station. “He heard my show on the radio, and he said he was just impressed with my style and my singing,” she said. “I just about fainted right there on the spot. He said, ‘This is Hank Thompson!’ And he invited me to sing with him and The Brazos Valley Boys at The Trianon that Saturday night.

I was probably about 14. I remember saying, ‘Oh, I’d love to, Mr. Thompson, but I’ll have to ask my mother!’ But they took me down, and that was the beginning of a great friendship and a relationship with Hank Thompson. He became my mentor, and helped me get my first and second record deals.” Before long, Wanda was a regular member of Hank’s troupe. But even his imprimatur couldn’t convince Capitol Records A&R man Ken Nelson to sign her to the label Thompson had scored so many smashes for—Nelson thought her too young. So Hank brought her to Decca Records, where producer Paul Cohen was more receptive. At the end of Wanda’s very first Decca date in March of ’54 in Hollywood, Thompson cajoled her into cutting You Can’t Have My Love as a duet with his bandleader Gray. “I was very upset. I knew in my mind that I didn’t want to be connected with a guy. I didn’t want a team,” said Wanda. “I didn’t even want to record it, but they kind of pressured me into it. I was nearly in tears when I was singing it, I was so mad.”

The song became a national hit, which dulled the sting. Jackson subsequently journeyed to Nashville in March of 1955 for a Decca session; while she was in town she made her debut on ‘The Grand Ole Opry.’ What should have been an early career highlight turned out to be anything but...

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