Hot Dog! It's Wanda Jackson

Her Majesty did it first and, really, has anyone done it better?

By Daiana Feuer
Published: Dec 01, 2007
Photography by Joey Carmelo

“I’d like them to put me in the rock and roll hall of fame while I’m still alive. Knowing me, they’ll put me in there after I’ve been dead twenty or forty years.”

Back when Janis Joplin was mumbling folk songs to herself in junior high and long before Joan Jett snarled out her love for rock n roll, countrified firebrand Wanda Jackson was wailing with a voice and an attitude unheard beyond black female throats.

Last month marked the rockabilly chanteuse’s seventh decade on the planet, years not put to waste. She’s kissed Elvis, never had a day job, wore dresses that bewildered the first television generation, recorded legendary songs (earning two Grammy nominations), traveled the world, was a Vegas attraction, and gave singing of terra firma pleasures the boot for the sake of holier pursuits. Put simply, Wanda Jackson is one of the first women to have journeyed the path of rock and roll.

The queen’s rather short, with a dome of black hair, long, time-knuckled fingers and a thick Oklahoma accent. A few hours before she’ll headline a rockabilly festival at Los Angeles’s Knitting Factory, Jackson nests on a cushioned chair in the corner of a nice but modest hotel room, under a lit lamp, gulping down a pain pill for her aching bones.

In the 1950s, country music and rhythm & blues tumbled together under the Southern moon, and birthed rockabilly, the cherubic, gap toothed half brother of rock and roll. Fueled by the fevered proselytizing of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, the music spread. And Jackson--fresh out of high school--was along for the ride, touring with budding rock royalty, ripe with as much duende as the boys. Enough to nab Presley’s affection, as well as his ring. Yes, they went steady.

Okie Wanda could twang a country torch song that’d slow-boil a heartbreak, but she had an edge, a scorching rebel yell in her girlish demeanor that set her apart. Other country singers wore full cowboy skirts and boots, but Wanda “couldn’t stand to wear them…I just looked squatty and dumpy in those things,” she states in no uncertain terms. Instead, Wanda came out on stage with long earrings, high heels and homemade form-fitting dresses that curved tightly around her figure with bouncy silk fringe. – And this was way before Tina Turner.

“It moves a lot better,” she points out, to say the least. Her dresses responded with a shimmying frenzy to the slightest dip of her hip. Wanda’s parents fully supported this aesthetic boldness. Her father, also her manager and tour chaperone, knew his daughter was a good girl but needed to stand out and be different, and her mother made all her clothes.

“I was a big fan, of course, of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor,” she remembers. “And I just always kind of wanted to look sexy or glamorous…At the beginning [the outfits] still looked a little western, but they were very feminine.”

As her style evolved, each outfit literally built upon the last. “I was really hard on my clothes. I just wore ‘em out.” She shrugs. “So when I was through with a garment I’d just say, ‘Mother, this is looking too frayed’ or something. Well, she’d take everything that was reusable. If the zipper was still good, she’d take it off. Rhinestones that were still sparkly, she’d take them off. So I don’t have anything left.” While nary a fringe tendril may remain, she can lay claim to bringing a little bit of punk glamour to the world of music, some do-it-your-way flair, which isn’t anything but a sweet legacy.

While other female performers sang syrupy pop and ballads a la Patsy Cline, under Elvis’s encouragement, Wanda growled and shook with her guitar, making rebellious party music. The King showed her how to take a country tune and mix it with blues to create a whole new animal. Thanks to tips from Presley, we have “Let’s Have a Party,” “I Gotta Know,” “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad,” “Rock Your Baby,” and “Fujiyama Mama” (#1 in Japan in ’65, despite the jaunty lyrics about destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki) – collectively, the holy grail of female-fronted rock.