Fabulous Friday: Wanda Jackson

Wanda Jackson was a name I hadn't noticed before - - I'm sure she came up in the Ken Burns country music series, or I might have seen her name at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but she didn't really stick with me. She was a country or rockabilly singer with a coarse quality to her singing that wasn't typical for a country singer at the time, that's why she's seen as a rock and roll pioneer. This video has a bonus of The Collins Kids singing "Sugar Time." The little boy looks like he's had more than sugar, he's definitely hopped up on something...

I've asked my brother Howard to collaborate with me on these fifty women of rock and roll, he knows infinitely more about all kinds of music than I do. And his writing is so full of vitality and flavor, I know you'll enjoy what he says. He has this to say about the woman who started the series, Sister Rosetta Tharpe:

This Sister has often been dubbed “The Grandmother Of Rock and Roll." She is credited with bringing gospel music out of the church and into clubs and juke joints (and The Cotton Club and Carnegie Hall). Rosetta was also one of the first to use distortion to great effect on the electric guitar, decades before it became the norm. A black woman playing electric guitar and fronting her own band. In the 30s! Chuck Berry once said his whole career was “one long Rosetta Tharpe impersonation”. That electric white Gibson SG is forever identified with her and there is nothing in the world as cool as her playing it at a train station in a fur coat. Yes, Queen.