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Wanda Jackson
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Wanda Jackson, in full Wanda Lavonne Jackson, (born October 20, 1937, Maud, Oklahoma, U.S.), American country singer who also achieved substantial success in rock and roll and earned the sobriquet “the Queen of Rockabilly.”
Jackson began singing on a daily Oklahoma City radio show in 1952, when she was still in high school. In 1954 country singer Hank Thompson invited her to record with his band, the Brazos Valley Boys, a collaboration that produced the country hit “You Can’t Have My Love.” After finishing school, Jackson joined a concert tour that also featured Elvis Presley, who encouraged her to branch out into the fast-developing rockabilly genre. In 1956 she signed with Capitol Records, with whom she demonstrated her stylistic versatility by recording a number of singles that featured a country track on one side of the record and a rockabilly track on the other. On her debut 45, “I Gotta Know” (1956), she even alternated between both genres on the same song.
With a series of hits such as “Let’s Have a Party” (1960), “Right or Wrong” (1961), and “In the Middle of a Heartache” (1961), Jackson quickly made a name for herself as a rare and powerful female voice in the rockabilly world. She also achieved international success with “Fujiyama Mama” (1957) in Japan and with a German-language rendition of “Santo Domingo” (1965).
In 1955, Jackson briefly dated Elvis Presley while on tour with him. She married former IBM programmer Wendell Goodman in 1961, who served as her manager. He died on May 21, 2017. The couple had two children.
As the commercial appetite for rockabilly waned in the 1960s, Jackson’s recordings increasingly focused on country. A religious conversion in the early 1970s turned her attention toward gospel music, beginning with the album Praise the Lord (1972). In the 1980s Jackson began touring in Europe, where rockabilly was undergoing a revival, and she released several records there. The following decade she returned to touring the United States, performing secular material. At age 73, Jackson mounted a comeback with the album The Party Ain’t Over (2011), which was produced by Jack White of the White Stripes, and she followed that with Unfinished Business (2012). She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009.
In the early 1980s, Jackson was invited to Europe to play and record rockabilly material when revivalists sought her out. She regularly toured Scandinavia, England, and Germany during the decade. Now embracing her rock-and-roll history, Jackson released the album Rockabilly Fever in 1984 (later issued by Rounder Records as Rock N' Roll Your Blues Away in 1986), her first secular album in a decade and her first recording of rock music in over twenty years.
Cyndi Lauper acknowledged Jackson's classic rockabilly records were a major influence and inspiration for her during this period, and Jackson's fans also included a new generation of country music female vocalists, among them Rosanne Cash, Pam Tillis, Jann Browne and Rosie Flores. Jackson recorded a duet with Browne on a 1987 album by Browne, and in 1995 she sang two duets with Flores on her 1995 album, Rockabilly Filly, and then embarked on a United States tour with her, her first American tour since the 1970s.
