Wanda Lavonne Jackson was, simply and without contest, the greatest menstruating rock ’n’ roll singer whom the world has ever known. Born in Maud, Oklahoma, on October 20, 1937, the cherished daughter of Tom and Nellie Jackson, she was a prodigious child in more ways than one. At the age of nine, she had been encouraged to play the piano by her father, an indigent laborer who had himself, in days of greater leisure, passed his hands with some degree of unpolished skill across the keys of that instrument. Soon after, of her own will, she turned to the guitar. As her mother was quoted as saying (in an article in the May 1966 issue of Hoedown, one of the outstanding illiterate periodicals of an outstandingly illiterate day), “Wanda wasn’t like other children after the guitar came into her life.”

Not like other children, indeed. At the age of 13, a year after her family moved to Oklahoma City, where her father had landed a job as a used-car salesman, Wanda already had her own nylon stockings, brassieres, and daily radio show, the latter broadcast by KLPR, a station two blocks from Capitol Hill High School, where she attended classes with her legs crossed.

In late 1953 and early 1954, when she was 16, Wanda, in addition to her radio show, which had been expanded from 15 minutes to a half hour daily, sang locally with the Merle Lindsay Band. Then, in the spring of 1954, fortune tugged at her hem. Hank Thompson, whose Brazos Valley Boys were the most successful Western-swing band of the day, heard Wanda on KLPR and telephoned her with an invitation to tour with him and the Brazos Valley Boys.

Thompson brought Wanda together with his arranger and bandleader, Billy Gray. That spring, Wanda made her first record, a duet with Gray (who, with Hank Thompson and others, had written it) called “You Can’t Have My Love,” released by Decca in June, a few days before Wanda finished her junior year at Capitol Hill. She toured the northeast with Hank Thompson that summer, and recorded more songs for Decca.

Her Decca records—there were a total of seven of them, released from June 1954 through December 1956—were basically country love songs (“Lovin’, Country Style,” “The Right To Love,” and so on), with occasional lapses into the cornbread abyss, such as the 1955 “Tears At The Grand Ole Opry” and the 1956 “Wasted,” which she wrote with her father. None of these records did much for Wanda, aside from getting her cast as the lead in her high school’s annual musical.

In September 1955, a few months after graduating from Capitol Hill, Wanda became a regular performer on Ozark Jubilee, the weekly ABC-TV series originating from Springfield, Missouri. (Wanda appeared on the show, on and off, for several years, as its name changed to Country Music Jubilee, in 1957, and then to Jubilee U.S.A. in 1958. The show was canceled abruptly, in 1960, when its host, country singer Red Foley, was busted for tax fraud.) In late 1955 and early 1956, she toured with Elvis Presley, who had recently been signed by RCA and was on the verge of becoming the biggest thing since CocaCola. In April 1956, Wanda signed a management deal with Jim Halsey, who also handled Hank Thompson. Halsey took her to Capitol Records, the company for which Hank Thompson had been recording since 1949; and that summer of 1956, in Los Angeles, 18-year-old Wanda Jackson began to sing the way the Devil had intended her to sing.

From her .first Capitol record, “I Gotta Know,” released in August 1956, to her version of The Robins’ “Riot In Cell Block #9,” released in February 1961, Wanda showed herself to be one of the most exceptional rock ’n’ roll stylists of her, or any other, day. Her voice, a wild-fluttering thing of sexy subtleties and sudden harshnesses, feral feline purrings and raving banshee shriek -ings, was a vulgar wonder to hear. She was a girl who could growl. Furthermore, she was the only girl who could hold her own with the big guys of rock ’n’ roll’s golden era, as her 1955-56 tour with Elvis and her 1957 tour with Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins attested.

Many of the early Capitol recordings, and the best of them, were fast, loud songs about ambivalent carnality. “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad” (1956) was a celebration of bitchdom. ‘Lets Have A Party (1960) was a lewd-voiced invocation of prophylactic love. In “Mean Mean Man” (1960) the joys of being slapped around were praised through wet lips. Best of all, however, was “Fujiyama Mama,” released in the first cold days of 1958. She sang Earl Burrows’s audacious lyrics as if she meant every word of them:

I been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima, too — The things I did to them, baby, I can do to you, ‘Cause I’m a Fujiyama mama, and I’m just about to blow my top — Fujiyama-yama, Fujiyama— And when I start eruptin’, ain’t nobody gonna make me stop.

Not even 20 years old, she sounded like she could fry eggs on her G-spot. And that, more than anything, was the problem; for while Wanda’s were among the most striking and finely-wrought records of their time—and they were finely-wrought on every level, produced as they were by the consummate west-coast studio craftsman of the ’50s, Ken Nelson, and utilizing as they did the talents of guitarist Joe Maphis and unsung-hero pianist Merrill Moore—the public was simply not prepared to accept a young lady who looked and sang as Wanda Jackson did. It was too hot a package to sell over the counter. Teresa Brewer, Connie Francis, yes; Wanda Jackson, no. Of all the records she made for Capitol from 1956 to 1960, only one, “Let’s Have A Party,” appeared on the charts, and, even then, only as high as Number 37.

In 1961, Wanda began recording in Nashville, re-crossing her legs and veering again towards tamer country stuff. “Right Or Wrong,” released in May of that year, hit Number 9 on the C&W charts, Number 29 on the pop charts. The cover photo of her Right Or Wrong album, issued at the end of August (it was her fourth album, and the first to sell moderately well), provided the last glimpse of Wanda as la bimbo fatale du rock ’n ’ roll, showing her pouting, her extramusical blessings accentuated by a tightlylaced corset.

But what the Devil laced, God unlaced. While she was fortunate enough to make a few dollars more with softer, more moralistic songs (“A Girl Don’t Have To Drink To Have Fun,” she vouched in 1967; two years more and it was a limping version of “If I Had A Hammer”), Wanda’s fire was out. In October 1961 she married an IBM programmer named Wendell Goodman. A daughter, Gina Gail, came the next year; a son, Gregory Jackson, in 1964. From Fujiyama mama to hibachi hostess; such are the wages of survival in a democracy of mediocrity.

Wanda recorded for Capitol thoughout the 1960s, into the early ’70s. From 1965-1967, she had her own syndicated TV program, Music Village. Her final Capitol album, Country Keepsakes, came out in January 1973. A year later, she appeared briefly at the bottom of the country charts with “Come On Home To This Lonely Heart,” a single on the Myrrh gospel label. In 1975 came a Myrrh album, Now I Have Everything, and a few more followed as the ’70s faded away. Then, finally, the voice that had been too hot to handle 20 years before was no more. As it is writ: menopause hath no mercy in the land. Or something like that. ^