WANDA JACKSON
The rock’n’roll godmother on honky tonkin’, sharp dressing and several Elvises.
Bow down as the Queen of Rockabilly gets in Confidential mood, and talks Joan Jett, guitars, and her mum watching her as she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“I was kind of a rebel.” WANDA JACKSON
“THIS PROBABLY will be my last album,” says Wanda Jackson on the line from Oklahoma City. “I don’t foresee wanting to continue any longer, ’cos I retired from travelling a couple of years ago. I miss my fans, I miss performing, but I don’t miss the travel…”
The excellent LP in question is called
released a mere 67 years after she began cutting records for Decca in 1954. A year later, she was touring with – and dating – Elvis Presley, who told her she had the perfect voice for rock’n’roll.
It is also her first album since she lost the man who travelled that road alongside her for 55 of those years, her husband and manager Wendell Goodman, who sadly died in 2017, and whose presence is felt in many of its songs.
You’ve influenced many women musicians who followed after. Joan Jett is on your new album, and it includes a version of You Drive Me Wild, which she wrote for The Runaways in 1976
I think it’s just great. Her company is the one that approached me about doing an album, so she helped me get it started, and of course we wanted just to have original songs on it. My granddaughter is my publicist in Nashville and she set up all these writing sessions with all these great writers in Nashville, so that’s a new experience for me. I’ve never written with other people, I was always by myself, so I learned a lot. We wrote the songs, as well as recorded them, in Nashville. I had to fly back and forth, and trying to coordinate all of our schedules was tricky, but we got it done, and I’m sure proud of it.
Joan’s song was on the list you gave us of five songs you admire, alongside the great Ray Charles version of Worried Mind, originally a hit for its co-writer Ted Daffan in the ’40s, back in the golden age of honky tonk music.
Well that’s what my daddy listened to, and my mother, on the radio. They went dancing every weekend, and they took me with them, so yes, I knew Ted Daffan’s version the best. But of course when Ray Charles came out with it, it just blew me away, it was so great.
Your fiddle-playing father bought you your Martin D18 guitar in a pawn shop, and your mother made your fringed stage dress. Both items are on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That’s right. Yeah, my career was really a family affair. Mother made all my clothes, street clothes as well as stage clothes. They fitted me like a glove and it was very valuable to me. Even these days, that wardrobe is about as important as my records. I was given a little flack for it, here and there, but anyway, my daddy was the one who said, “Do it the way you want to do it.” So he gave me permission. I was kind of a rebel.
In your acceptance speech at your Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2009, you said that your mother was watching, aged 95.
It was very special. She died a couple of years later, she was 97, so bless her heart, she outlived daddy by a long time.
Your husband Wendell led the campaign to have you inducted, supported by such as Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello. I remember him saying when introducing you on-stage in London, “At first I thought, Just what I needed, another Elvis in my life…”
That was funny. My husband was a clown, he was my resident clown. All of these lyrics on the record stem from the stories of mine and Wendell’s married life. He was a one-man show. He did it all, all but the singing, so I still had a job…
Tell us something you’ve never told an interviewer before
I don’t think that exists… unless you want to know what I had for breakfast. Actually, I haven’t had it yet. I thought I’d have a cup of coffee and talk to you and then I’d have my oatmeal and my cinnamon.
Encore is released on August 20 via Big Machine Records/Blackheart Records.