Ace Records' Queen of Rockabilly is such a good idea for a Wanda
Jackson collection that it's astonishing that it didn't get put
together and released until 2000 - or that Bear Family Records,
which is no slouch when it comes to distilling down certain
aspects and angles of American country and rock & roll stars,
didn't do it first. It should have been out a lot earlier, in the
1970s - that would have saved hundreds of listeners (maybe
thousands, around the world) having to buy, borrow, or steal her
old LPs and singles, so we could isolate and distill down her
rockabilly and rock & roll tracks onto open-reel tape or audio
cassette. Compiler/annotator Rob Finnis allows the songs to jump
across seven years, back and forth, pulling together the strands
and threads of this side of Jackson's work into a killer
collection of 30 songs, clocking in at less than 70 minutes. And
running through the rough and raucous rock & roll sounds is the
enigma of Wanda Jackson herself - this CD touches more musical
and cultural buttons than even the man who put it together seems
aware of, or than Jackson herself will ever admit to. She has
said that she was never as consciously committed to rockabilly or
rock & roll as her career direction would seem to indicate; she
spent years walking a tightrope between traditional country and
rock & roll, just trying to carve out a niche for herself and
earn a living, and rock & roll was as new to her as it was to
most country music fans in 1954-1955. In keeping with the
sensibilities of the era, as the daughter of white working-class
Texas-born transs to Oklahoma (and then to California -
around Bakersfield, natch - and back to Oklahoma), blues and R&B,
as something that she would do herself or allow herself to be
influenced by, were mostly alien to her when she began exploring
the music (with help and encouragement from Elvis Presley) in
1955. Luckily, the King of Rock & Roll was correct in his
assessment of Jackson as a natural, and she became the Queen of
Rockabilly at a time when Janis Martin was "the Female Elvis" and
Brenda Lee was some child mutant doing rock & roll with some
success. Jackson even recorded with a mixed-race band, the Poe
Cats (including Big Al Downing), beginning in early 1958, and the
records were amazing, although they didn't start selling
seriously until 1960, when a DJ started playing "Let's Have a
Party," a three-year-old track off of her 1957 debut LP, and
Capitol got it out as a single. She was suddenly on the pop
charts, as a unique voice and personality by then, and her
career, which had started to coast, was suddenly thrown into high
gear. It's all here, the astonishingly raucous and even raunchy
early singles like "Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad" and "Fujiyama
Mama" (the latter a huge hit in Japan, amazingly enough), the LP
renditions of "Long Tall Sally" and "Rock Your Baby," and the
raw, throat-ripping performances of "Rip It Up," from as late as
1963. There are some especially amazing moments amid the
rip-roaring rock & roll that even Finnis misses, such as
Jackson's rendition of Chuck Berry's "Brown Eyed Handsome Man."
the song itself was Berry's commentary on the plight of the black
man in white society, but for a white Southern woman rocker to
sing it in 1961, even on an LP, while Berry was in the middle of
his first-round trials for alleged illicit activities with an
underage girl, was an amazingly challenging and provocative act -
Finnis extends the effect by following it with the later LP track
"You Don't Know Baby," a slow, smoldering blues that Jackson
makes work as a woman's song. She's equally bold and convincing
on Little Richard's "Slippin' and Slidin'" from the same session
as the Berry song; of course, in 1958 Jackson was also singing
"Rock Your Baby," with it's demand "Rock your baby all night
long, and don't be slow" - a song she wrote herself, no less. By
the time it's over, this.