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Badlands Pawn announces concert series lineup
from: journalstar.com
By L. Kent Wolgamott | Lincoln Journal Star
Wanda Jackson took a tumble when she was getting off a plane at the Nashville airport earlier this month and hit the ground hard.
"I took what I thought was just a little fall," Jackson said Tuesday from her Oklahoma City home. "I'm doing OK. It's just a matter of time. I've got a black eye and a puncture-type cut on my knee. I've got it doctored up.
"I'm wearing a big old splint. They don't want me bending my knee. I can take that brace off when I'm on stage. Well, I'm going to take that brace off, no matter what they say."
The 78-year-old Queen of Rockabilly is a the-show-must-go-on type, and she and Wendell Goodman, her husband of 56 years, will head up Interstate 35 for a Friday night gig at the Bourbon Theatre in Lincoln.
"I'm one that wants to keep the bills paid," she said with a laugh. "I was just brought up if you possibly can physically, you should really try to do the dates. People know we're coming, they've bought tickets to the show. It's an event for them. I hate to throw a damper on something like that."
Jackson, who last played Lincoln in 2006, is one of hardest-working women in show business at an age when most entertainers are retired. But she says she's doing what she loves: performing, writing songs and making records.
In fact, the trip to Nashville was part of the process of creating a new album, which she says should be out in the middle of next year.
"I've been to Nashville a couple times to do some writing with some of their top writers," she said. "I haven't been writing songs for years now. I quit some time ago. I guess I got lazy. I like to do songs I've written. You feel more connected to the record that way."
In early December, Jackson will go to New York to cut five or six songs with JOAN JETT, who is producing the new album.
"It's very cool," Jackson said. "I've got to see her perform recently. My goodness she's a powerhouse. I'm looking forward to it. I've talked to her a few times. We're both from the same background. Of course, she's not as old as me. But she plays a lot of rockabilly type songs."
Jett is the third noted contemporary musician to take Jackson into the studio in the past five years. In 2011, Jack White produced the critically acclaimed "The Party Ain't Over," which became Jackson's first album to hit the Billboard Hot 200 chart. The next year, Justin Townes Earle produced "Unfinished Business."
But Jett represents something special for Jackson, who said she only examined her legacy after discovering her trailblazing influence on women in music.
"When all these great, famous girls would come up to me and go, ‘Thanks for opening the door for girls,' I thought about it," Jackson said. "I'm so glad I did back then what I felt like doing. I didn't want to be stuck in a place called country music."
Back then was 1954, when the 17-year-old Jackson, who had an Oklahoma City radio show while still in high school, was discovered by country singer Hank Thompson. He invited her to sing with his Brazos Valley Boys, and she recorded a few singles with the band, including a song that made the charts. But Capitol Records refused to sign her because "girls don't sell records."
So she landed on Decca Records and on package tours across the South that were headlined by the Hillbilly Cat, a rockin' sensation from Memphis named Elvis Presley.
"We worked together a lot in in ‘55, ‘56 and part of ‘57," Jackson said. "Of course, like all the teenage girls, I had a crush on him. He'd take me to the matinee movies and we'd go out for burgers to eat after. A lot of the time, it was his band, Scotty (Moore) and Bill (Black) and my father, who went with me on the road, and me and Elvis."
Jackson still has the ring Presley gave her when they were dating. But even more important to her, she said, he encouraged her to do the kind of music he did -- what was then called rockabilly and now called rock 'n' roll.
"There weren't any other girls doing it that I knew of," Jackson said. "After working with Elvis and getting his encouragement and help -- he was so generous with his advice and time -- I decided to try it. I didn't think I could sing it. He did. That whole time at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, my heart was filled with gratitude for Elvis."
That evening was in 2009, when Jackson was inducted into the hall by Rosanne Cash.
"It was probably the most awesome evening of my life and my career," Jackson said. "I never dreamed they would put me in that place, that Hall of Fame. If somebody'd asked me I'd have said, ‘I didn't have a string of hits. I don't belong there.' But they found this category, early influences, that was perfect for me. I'm deserving of that part."
Jackson rightfully claims to have changed fashion for the "country girls" of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s and released a series of rockabilly albums including "There's a Party Goin' On" and "Right or Wrong" before returning to country and gospel in the late '60s through the ‘70s.
In 1984 she released "Rockabilly Fever," marking her return to rock ‘n' roll, a move created when she began performing in Europe, where audiences embraced her and her music as they do with many American roots artists.
In the early 2000s, she began to be rediscovered in America, making records and playing places like Lincoln's Zoo Bar. Then came her hookup with Jack White, appearances on late-night TV shows, bigger audiences and more shows, now almost all of them in the U.S.
And she's giving no thought to retiring any time soon.
"Show business is a unique type of business," Jackson said. "To many of us, it's really not like work. We enjoy playing and singing for an audience. It's hard to quit, especially for me. I've got this whole new generation of fans. It's still fun. It's getting harder.
"I'll know when it's time to quit. But we're doing what we like to do and we're getting paid for it. I'm not going to bail out now." |
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