In the summer of ’53, Sipes, by then writing songs, accompanied the Jacksons on a vacation to Bakersfield, where he met the musicians congregating at the Blackboard, which was home base to Buck Owens, Ferlin Husky and Wynn Stewart. Sipes began going by the name Tommy Collins; a budding songsmith, he stayed on when the Jacksons returned home. A year later, Collins wrote his first hit, “If You Ain’t Lovin’ (You Ain’t Livin’)”, a 1955 smash for Faron Young.
Back in Oklahoma City, Wanda’s radio show got noticed by one of the city’s most illustrious musicians, Hank Thompson, whose Brazos River Boys — a multi-piece western swing orchestra — held court at the city’s largest dance hall, the Trianon Ballroom, from 1952 to 1954. Thompson had his own Oklahoma City-based television show, and he’d scored the #1 C&W hit of 1951 with “The Wild Side Of Life”. (Its answer song, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels”, gave Kitty Wells her start on the road to becoming the queen of country music.) “Hank Thompson was then and still is my all-time favorite singer,” Jackson says today.
One day, driving around town, Thompson heard Jackson on the radio, stopped the car, and called her up, asking her to guest at the microphone at his Trianon show that very Saturday night. When the excited Jackson told him she’d have to get her mother’s permission, she recalls, Thompson asked, “How old are you, gal?” When Wanda told him she was 15, he gasped, “Ain’t that somethin’!”
Of course, Nellie and Tom gave their OK and were front and center at the Trianon that night when their teenage daughter made her big-band debut, singing “Your Cheatin’ Heart”. From that night on, Wanda was hooked on the stage: In addition to performing with Thompson, she began fronting Lindsay’s Oklahoma Nightriders, who had a Saturday afternoon radio show, as well as a gig at Merle Lindsay’s Funspot.
Not surprisingly, her musical focus affected Wanda’s activities at school. “I couldn’t join the pep club because the games would be on Friday, and I’d get hoarse, and I worked every Saturday,” she says. “I went to a few games, but I could hardly sing the next day.” She had no interest in immature high school boys anyway, and found a new boyfriend in steel guitar player A.G. Lane. A couple of her girlfriends were somewhat interested in music too, though: Norma Jean Beasler also got a show on KLPR, and her pal Vicki Countryman’s mother, Thelma Blackmon, was an aspiring songwriter.
In 1954, Thompson had no doubt his 16-year-old protege was ready for the recording studio and told his Capitol Records A&R man, Ken Nelson, about the young fireball singer he’d discovered. Citing her youth, Nelson passed, so Thompson pitched Wanda, his bandleader, Billy Gray, and a song that belonged to his publishing company, “You Can’t Have My Love”, to Decca Records’ Paul Cohen, who would sign Buddy Holly the following year. The deal went through, and though Jackson had serious qualms about starting her recording career in the form of a boy-girl duo, she half-heartedly agreed. “They wanted us to do that duet, and I was pretty upset about it,” Jackson recalls. “I didn’t want to because I didn’t want to be known as a duet act. I wanted my own career. But it was a hit.”
After “You Can’t Have My Love” rose to #8 on the country chart, Jackson’s career was off and running. For Decca, she also cut such twangy numbers as Tommy Collins’ “The Right To Love”, the catchy “Lovin’ Country Style”, and her own composition, “If You Knew What I Know”, which her father encouraged her to write. Soon, she had her own TV spot in Oklahoma City, as well as constantly appearing on Thompson’s show.
As she had started writing her own songs, she’d begun to concoct a new image for herself, which her nimble-fingered seamstress mom helped her carry out. “My first fancy costumes were cowgirl outfits by Nudie,” Jackson recalls, referring to the famous rodeo tailor, “but my mother’s a very frugal lady. She looked at my Nudie outfits and she said, ‘Well, I can make these costumes.'” She continued to do so for the next half-century; now in her 90s, Wanda’s mother only recently stopped making her daughter’s stage outfits.
Wanda’s fashion sense soon went beyond the standard cowgirl fare. “I got tired of the cowboy boots and said, ‘Mother, I’m going to throw these boots away. I want some high heels. I want some long earrings.’ I thought, ‘Gosh, we need some sex appeal and a little glamour.’ I sketched my ideas, starting off designing a kind of a full skirt with a leather fringe and rhinestones. Then Mother started taking the skirts in, making them a little straighter, and I decided I wanted rhinestone spaghetti straps and a lower neckline. So she said, ‘OK.’ And there we went.”
Though one of Jackson’s white fringed dresses today hangs in the Country Music Hall of Fame, back in 1955, one of C&W’s leading figures tried to put the kibosh on her look. She got a call from the Grand Ole Opry to appear after her first hit, and, waiting backstage to go on, she met her segment host, Ernest Tubb, who took one look at her teensy rhinestone-strapped dress and informed her that she could not show her shoulders onstage.
Still peeved four decades later, Jackson recalls Tubb told her if she didn’t “cover up,” she couldn’t go on. Humiliated, Jackson threw on her fringed cowgirl jacket, hit the stage, and could barely get through her number. Meanwhile, Minnie Pearl and Rod Brasfield were cutting up behind her, distracting the audience and making them laugh. Wanda vowed never to return to the mother church of country music.
Her style had quite the opposite effect, however, on a young performer on the Bob Neal C&W package tour she joined the summer of ’55. Not yet a nationwide sensation, Elvis Presley met Wanda Jackson at a radio station in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, just prior to doing a show with her shortly after she had graduated from high school. She’d never heard of him, even though she had become a regular on the ABC television show “The Ozark Jubilee”, where she’d met lots of new performers, including Brenda Lee and Porter Wagoner. That night, sharing the stage with Charlie Feathers and Bud Deckelman, Jackson joined the growing legions of swooning Presley admirers.
“I knew this guy was different,” she recalls. “I’d never been in the presence of somebody with that kind of charisma.” Needless to say, the two hit it off, with Elvis being equally enamored of Jackson and her raw, sensual style. The following October, they hooked up for a tour of West Texas. By then, Tom Jackson had quit his job to be his daughter’s full-time road manager, so when Elvis wanted her to ride along to gigs in his Cadillac, the answer was no. But before and after each show, the two singers hung out, talked about music, and caught a few movies. Presley insisted she try the uptempo, bluesy stuff he was doing, rather than continuing to sing straight country.
A few months later, after she cut her last C&W sides for Decca, Jackson finally inked a deal with Capitol (Thompson had re-approached Ken Nelson on her behalf). Immediately, they tried to “pigeonhole” her as a country artist, Jackson recalls, but “I wanted to do country and rockabilly….I told Capitol, ‘I’m a singer — I’m gonna sing whatever I want to sing! You can do whatever you want with it.”
Nelson capitulated to an extent, allowing his 18-year-old firebrand to split her early singles between country weepers and red-hot rock ‘n’ roll. For her first sessions, in June and September 1956, Capitol teamed Jackson with some of its hottest, most twangful pickers: Joe Maphis (a star guitarist on TV’s “Ranch Party”), Buck Owens and Lewis Talley (both still regulars at Bakersfield’s Blackboard), and Ralph Mooney on steel. “I Gotta Know”, written by her friend’s mom, Thelma Blackmon (who had provided several C&W songs for Jackson’s Decca recordings), showcased both sides of Jackson’s sound, with verses alternating between slow country fiddle tunes and electric-guitar-fueled rave-ups, her vocals see-sawing easily between the two diverse styles. The single hit #15 on the C&W charts.
