This article is part of it It is overlookeda series of obituaries for notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported in the Times.
When Cordell Jackson’s long and mostly obscure music career briefly crossed paths with American pop culture in the early 1990s (coinciding with her appearance on a popular beer commercialin which she showed a few tricks to guitarist Brian Setzer), it was almost as if she had stepped out of a dream: Grandma, resplendent in a shiny dress and bouffant, peering through her old lady’s glasses while waving wildly outside. a cherry red electric guitar crank amp up to 10.
Even if we’d never seen or heard Jackson before, he seemed to inhabit the dusty bric-a-brac of our country’s collective unconscious: one of rock ‘n’ roll’s forgotten pioneers, Cordell Jackson had been making music for more than half a century . century.
Cordell Miller was born on July 15, 1923, to William and Stella Miller in Pontotoc, a small town once known as a hideout for Jesse James’ gang of outlaws in the 19th century. He took an early interest in music, learning to play the banjo, piano, upright bass and harmonica.
At age 12, she was sitting in with her father’s string band, the Pontotoc Ridge Runners. “When I picked up the guitar, I could see it in their eyes: ‘Little girls don’t play guitar.'” he later recalled. “I looked at them and said:I I am doing.'”
Jackson always claimed that she rocked long before the men who would make rock and roll famous. “If what I’m doing now is rock and roll or rockabilly or whatever,” he told The Tulsa World newspaper in 1992, “then I did it when Elvis was 1 year old. This is just a fact.”
Or, as he told Cornfed magazine: “Whatever song it was, I always creamed it, so to speak. I play fast. I always wrapped it up.”
In 1943, she married William Jackson, moved to Memphis and began trying to break into the male-dominated music scene. He eventually befriended and recorded demos with producer Sam Phillips, who would go on to start Sun Records. But she grew impatient with Phillips, who saw her gender as an obstacle, and formed Moon Records, fetching one of the first women in America to record and produce their own music (some say The first) and securing her place in history.
“Cordell was immune to being told no. It was almost like that was her art,” country singer-songwriter Laura Cantrell said by phone. “A lot of artists get told ‘no’ – that what we want to do is not possible, but Cordell was absolutely determined to be an artist. That was not typical of a woman, especially in the South.”
Recordings for Moon Records took place in Jackson’s living room, where he engineered, produced and released music from local artists such as Allen Page, Earl Patterson and Johnny Tate. Although Jackson initially tried mostly on the production end, she also released some of her own performances, including 1958’s “Rock and Roll Christmas” and “Beboppers’ Christmas.”
But neither she nor her list of artists made it big, and the 1960s and 1970s saw Jackson move through an itinerant series of other kinds of work: at a printing company; as an interior designer in a real estate office. as a DJ at Memphis’ all-female station WHER? runs a junk shop. It wasn’t until the early 1980s, when she happened to cross paths with musician, artist and filmmaker Tav Falco, that things really changed for her.
The two first met at a Western Sizzlin steakhouse in Memphis for a benefit for longtime Sun Records gofer Don Ezell. “Every guitar player in Memphis was there,” Falco said in a video interview. This included Jackson, who approached him after hearing his band, Panther Burns (incl. Alex Chilton), cover of one of her originals, “Dateless Night”. The two became fast friends. He invited her to appear on bills with him and his band and she accepted, despite the fact that, at nearly 60, she had yet to play her first professional live gig.
This marked the beginning of the sensational second act of Jackson’s musical career, as she became – among a certain set – an elder statesman of grungy thrash guitar. During a 1988 appearance on WFMU’s “The Hound” radio show, Jackson plugged in her guitar and let it rip. the result it sounds less like a performance than a wild animal letting loose in the studio. In an interview, Jim Marshall, the show’s host, described Jackson’s playing as “some of the meanest, meanest rock and roll guitar I’ve ever heard in my life.”
He headlined colorful, now-defunct New York rock clubs such as CBGB, Lone Star, and the Lakeside Lounge, as well as Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ He played mostly solo, but occasionally local musicians supported her, including Brooklyn band A-Bones. “There were no rehearsals,” recalls Miriam Linna, the band’s drummer, in an interview. “It was just ‘Let’s go!'”
Susan M. Clarke, editor and publisher of Cornfed magazine, added: “I can’t imagine anyone knew what to do with her. I’m surprised they didn’t arrest her.”
Offstage, Jackson was down-to-earth but proper and deeply religious. She did not swear, and drank “nothing but milk or water,” she he said Roctober magazine in 1993. Falco remembered her as saying that doctors had put her on “a meat-free diet” and Kenn Goodman — whose Pravda Records released her album “Live in ChicagoIn 1997 — he said in an interview that whenever Jackson traveled (always in her yellow Cadillac, she didn’t like airplanes), it was with “her own steak, her own milk and giant jugs of tap water from Memphis.” because you trust no other species.
Nancy Apple, a close friend and co-worker, said that when Jackson went shopping, “he would wear old man’s white gloves — not for fashion. he always said, “I don’t want to touch all that money!’” When he got home, Jackson would take all the bills he had received as change, wash them in the sink and hang them on pegs to dry.
Antics aside, it was what Jackson did on stage that was truly amazing. Watching archival footage of her performances is a mind-blowing experience. Speaking from the stage at a 1995 concert in Memphis, Jackson described her music as “anywhere from a barnyard disaster to classical.”
There was an unbridled ferocity to Jackson’s playing, almost as if he was fighting her guitar to give her what she wanted. Her compositions—most of them orchestral—may not be terribly unusual, but what she did with them, in her urgent, raw and unapologetically rough way, was. Jackson didn’t just pluck her guitar strings when she played. Broke options.
The intonation didn’t seem to matter to her. Nor did it take time: In one interview, he said, “I found that the faster I play, the more accurate I become.” Form and melody, too, seemed mostly off topic. Instead, it was all stance, attack, pace, speed and noise.
“She was comfortable in her own skin,” said A-Bones bassist Marcus Natale — she didn’t put on airs, she didn’t compromise, and it seems she was never anything less (or more) than exactly who she was. , her performances testify to the compelling power of ragged, unpolished music.
“This isn’t a masterpiece,” she wrote on the sleeve of one of her records, “but it might be so bad you’ll like it.”
Jackson died of pancreatic cancer on October 14, 2004, in Memphis. It was 81.
In her music and what she had in mind, Jackson was nothing if not determined. “I’ve never been confused about what to do while I’ve been down here,” he said in 1999. “If I think about it, I do it.”
Howard Fishman is a musician and composer and author of “For Anyone Who Ever Asked: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.”