Wanda Jackson says she has been described as a sweet lady with a nasty voice.
Wanda Jackson speaks slowly, almost languidly, which makes the build-up to her carefully prepared joke quite subtle as the 75-year-old begins by asking me what the weather is like in Sydney.
Told it's warm and humid, she replies that having heard it would be nice, "I got out my bathing suit to try it on". She pauses.
"But there was a hole in the knee of it and we can't go on the beach like that," she says. Pause again. "I have a reputation to uphold." Oh yes, tell your friends, she’s here all week. Or at least she’s here this week.
Jackson, who will perform in Sydney on Saturday, is still considered the queen of rockabilly, more than 50 years after becoming the first female to hit the charts playing that mix of rhythm and blues and hillbilly music.
She still tours, still records and still attracts the attention of young men. Men such as Jack White and Justin Townes Earle, the musicians who produced her two most recent albums.
"With each [producer] you feel your way at the beginning: he is testing me and I'm testing him," she says from the US. "The record I made with Jack, there were some particular challenges, singing stuff I wasn't comfortable with [in particular Amy Winehouse's You Know I'm No Good] but you grow by stretching yourself. But then it was nice to fall back and do stuff [with Earle] that just comes naturally to me."
If the men have always paid attention, the women have always been even more excited, with Jackson an influence on women singing rock and country through the decades, right down to Adele, who reportedly called Jackson "my rockabilly Etta James" and said her hit Rollin' in the Deep wouldn't exist without the queen of rockabilly.
Part of that influence was in attitude. While she may be making jokes about her age now, Jackson was once considered a genuine wild girl, the female Elvis Presley (who incidentally she briefly dated). That reputation came via relatively rambunctious hits such as Hot Dog!, That Made Him Mad and Fujiyama Mama – possibly the original big-in-Japan song – and a cover of Presley's Let's Have a Party. The fact that she was always well behaved, hardly licentious on stage and by the late '60s was actually singing gospel music didn't matter.
"One reporter said I was a sweet lady with a nasty voice," Jackson says approvingly. "I think the songs I sang gave a different impression because I came across as a mean and forward and brashy type gal. And I'm not really any of those things." Pause. "But don't tell anybody."
Of course these days the young Jackson would be considered a tame creature. At least until she sang and that voice was let loose, a voice that still has a fair amount of sass even if it has lost a lot of its, for want of a better term, ballsiness. Not that its absence will send her into retirement any time soon, her schedule booked years in advance while many of her contemporaries long ago parked their careers permanently.
"I do hope I can bow out gracefully, but it's addictive: I want to sing," Jackson says. "People have a natural calling and you are very lucky if you can find that and make it your livelihood. I have loved performing ever since I can remember. When I was six, watching other performers, I knew I was going to be a girl singer. I never even prepared for anything else. I knew I was going to have to perform or marry me a rich man."
Wanda Jackson plays at the Factory Theatre on March 23.
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