“You’ll have to get the black boy off the stage,” he said. “We don’t allow that.”
His comment really startled me. I said, “What do you mean?”
“I mean niggers aren’t allowed on this stage,” the guy said. “Not on my watch!”
By this point, the crowd had gotten quiet, and everyone was wondering what was going on. He spun around and headed back to his office.
The Poe Kats were wondering what was happening, too. I turned around and told the band, “Okay, pack up, guys. We’ve got to go. He said Al can’t be on the stage with us.”
“It’s okay, Wanda,” Al said. “I don’t want y’all to miss out on the gig. I’ll wait in the car and you just go ahead and finish up.”
Not a chance. I said, “Al, you’re as much a part of this band as any of us. If you go, then we all go.”
He smiled and nodded. “Thank you, Wanda. That means a lot to me.”
The guys started taking off their guitars, unplugging their amplifiers, and packing up to go. When that manager saw what was happening, he ran over and said, “Oh no. There’s been a misunderstanding. The rest of you can stay. We still want a good show here tonight.”
“Look, he’s part of our band,” I said. If he’s not welcome, then none of us are.” I asked Al one time, “How in the world do you stand the fact that all of us can go in a place and you can’t go with us, or that people make you feel so unwelcome just because of who you are?”
“Well, you know, it hurts,” he said. I asked him why he did it and he just grinned really big and said, “For the music.”
That was something I could understand. We musicians and singers will put up with an awful lot just to be able to perform. I was really proud of Al in the late 1970s when he started recording for Warner Bros. He put three or four songs into the Top 20 on the country singles chart, which was very exciting to me. He was a warm, wonderful man and a real talent.
When I recorded the Wanda Jackson LP, I brought the Poe Kats into the studio to be my backing band. They didn’t have a bass player at the time, so we augmented the lineup with Skeets McDonald on bass and Buck Owens on rhythm guitar. Ken Nelson was great to allow that. In Nashville there were studio players and there were live players, and rarely did the categories cross. After Buck Owens transitioned from musician-for-hire to Capitol artist, Ken let him use his own group, The Buckaroos, in the studio. He did the same with Merle Haggard, who brought in his band, The Strangers, to back him on his Capitol sessions. I think one of the things that made Ken such a great producer was that he trusted the vision of his artists. He let us do things that wouldn’t have flown in Nashville, and I think it helped us create a distinct sound. When I recorded “Let’s Have a Party,” for example, I had been playing it in my live shows. The band knew it backward and forward. Even though good studio musicians would have worked up a great arrangement right away, it was nice to record it with the boys who were playing it with me every night. They knew what I wanted and it made for a very good record.
As much as Ken encouraged his artists to be themselves, however, he also had a responsibility to Capitol Records to earn a profit. Ken and Daddy and I were all happy with the material that we were recording, but Ken was getting pressure from above to have me figure out if I was going to be a rockabilly artist or a country artist. The gap had widened between rock and country, and it was almost as if artists were being forced to pick sides. Someone like me who wanted to wholeheartedly embrace both rock and country just couldn’t find acceptance in either world.
After not having recorded at all in 1959, Ken called a meeting with me and Daddy. He pointed out that the only success I had experienced as an artist was on the country chart and that my rock material, even though it sounded great, just wasn’t going anywhere. He wanted to schedule a session for January of 1960, but suggested that we focus on country material and put our efforts into building the country fan base going forward. It was time to leave rock and roll behind. I didn’t like being pigeonholed. I wanted to record whatever I wanted to record, but I also understood that Capitol Records had made an investment in me. They had signed me as a country singer, but I was shooting off all over the place. Every career needs direction, so I decided, “Okay, I’ll let them pigeonhole me so they can really focus their efforts and get me solidly established with the country crowd.”
We recorded exclusively country songs at that January session, including a twangy shuffle called “Please Call Today” and a crying waltz called “My Destiny.” They were released as two sides of a single in the spring of 1960. The rockin’ 1950s were over, and Wanda Jackson the country queen was ready to take over the honky tonk world once again.
I was out on the road with the Poe Kats several months later when Ken tracked me down via phone.
“Congratulations, Wanda!” he said.
I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Congratulations for what?” I said. He paused for a moment, surprised I hadn’t heard.
“For getting back on the charts,” he chuckled.
“Oh, Ken,” I replied, “I had no idea. Which side is doing well? Is it “Please Call Today” or is it “My Destiny?”
“Neither. It’s ‘Let’s Have a Party,’” he said.
I laughed. “Very funny,” I shot back, “a rock and roll song from two years ago that was just an album cut is my new country hit? Now I know you’re pulling my leg.”
Ken assured me it wasn’t a joke. After we’d finally made the tough decision to put rock and roll behind us and focus on country, I was scoring my first Top 40 pop hit with a rock-and-roll song. Apparently, a deejay in Iowa had started playing the song off my Wanda Jackson album as the theme to his show. Every time he’d play it, the switchboard at the station would light up and the callers would want to know who it was. This deejay called up Capitol Records, got in touch with Ken, and convinced him to put out “Party” as a single. Around the same time “Long Tall Sally,” from that same self-titled debut album, became a hit in Italy. It was a total shock that a two-year-old album was yielding that kind of success, but there I was again, right back up on that fence straddling the line between country and rock.
The success of “Party” prompted Capitol to repackage some of my rockabilly singles together as an album called Rockin’ with Wanda. Though it was really more of a compilation than anything, that became my second Capitol LP. Suddenly, the focus was shifting once again. After “Party” became a hit, I did Dick Clark’s show in November of 1960 and soon found myself on the bill with big pop stars like Bobby Vinton. I was uncomfortable around those artists, and their crowds were what I would call the bubblegum crowd. I was an adult and I was used to adults in my audience. I did not like singing to those little kids. I didn’t feel like I was in my element, so I didn’t do very many of those kinds of shows.
My newfound rock success did earn me some great bookings in Las Vegas, which I loved. I had already worked the Showboat, but with a new record hitting pretty good on the pop charts, I was invited to do a show at the Golden Nugget. That’s when we started calling the band The Party Timers. By that point, Bobby Poe had moved on, and I’d recruited a guy named Billy Graves to front the band on the opening slot. The rest of the Poe Kats stuck with me for a while, but then different musicians came and went. We finally settled down with a pretty stable group, including a blind drummer named Don Bartlett from Kansas. He stood up when he played and didn’t use a bass drum. He was also a great singer and added a lot to my show with his vocal backing.
In those days, the Nugget was the coveted gig in Vegas, and you had to have a great band. I brought in a new bass player, Mike Lane, who wound up staying with me a long time. He was a tall good-looking guy who sang great. Even though Don Bartlett was such a great singer, he was handling his duties as a drummer. We decided I needed a new front man who could sing and help me carry the show. I was keeping my eyes open for the right person who would fit the bill. One night I worked a club in the Washington D.C. area. There was a guy
there who was the guitarist in the house band, but also performed as a featured act. The manager of the club said, “You ought to watch this guy. He’s really something, and he keeps this place filled up.” We watched him and he was hilarious. Plus, he was a great singer and he could play the guitar like crazy. That was the first time I became aware of Roy Clark.
We offered Roy the position as lead guitarist and front man for The Party Timers, and he jumped at the chance. It worked out great because he got to sing, do comedy, and he added so much to the group. He was such a good musician that he really sharpened up my band. He made sure we nailed the endings to each song, and he got those arrangements really tight. In the nine months or so that Roy was in the group, he was a real asset.
The hours in Vegas were brutal. We worked five forty-five-minute sets with fifteen-minute breaks between them every night. Once I started playing Vegas, I’d be there for a couple of weeks at a time. I barely knew what to do with myself having to stay in one place that long, but I liked it because it was Vegas. If you wanted a drink you could get it. If you wanted breakfast in the middle of the night, you could do it. You could go to a movie anytime. If you wanted to go to a show or two or three, you just did it. Everything was just wide open all the time. It was my kind of town. Years later, when I went to Branson, I was forced to sit still again. There wasn’t much to do there, so I got the heebie-jeebies having to stay put. But Vegas was different. I got to know some of the musicians and other singers. I got to know some of the fans. I also got to party a little more than usual. In Vegas, every night is Saturday night. Every day, too.
Chapter 15
RIGHT OR WRONG
In 1961 I hit my commercial peak by finally finding success in both the country and pop fields. In January I released a rock LP called There’s a Party Goin’ On, featuring Roy Clark on some lightning-fast guitar solos. Since the Rockin’ With Wanda LP that was released the previous year was a collection of earlier singles, There’s a Party Goin’ On was the only proper all-rock album I recorded for Capitol. Later that year, I released two songs that each reached both the Top 10 on the country singles chart and the Top 20 on the pop chart. “Right or Wrong” was released in the spring, while “In the Middle of a Heartache,” my highest charting single ever, came out near the end of the year.
I had gone to Nashville in the fall of 1960 for a few days of recording sessions. It was the first time I had made any records there since my Decca days, and Ken wanted to record both country and rock material. We recorded the entire There’s a Party Goin’ On album, which included songs like “Hard Headed Woman,” “Tongue Tied,” and “Man We Had a Party.” We also cut four sides intended for singles. “Little Charm Bracelet” was a country song that was paired with “Riot in Cell Block No. 9” on the flip side. The latter had been a number one R&B hit for The Robins that was written and produced by the legendary team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who are best known for writing a ton of Elvis hits, including “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock.”
Neither side of the single charted for me, but I was the first woman to ever record “Riot in Cell Block No. 9,” and it went on to become one of my classic rockabilly cuts. The original version had a line that said “serving time for armed robbery.” I changed it to “serving time in Tehachapi,” which was the location of a women’s prison outside Bakersfield. I was at an event in Paris a few years ago, and was seated next to Jerry Leiber. He said, “I don’t know where you got that line about Tehachapi, but your version of it was so much better than ours. Don’t tell anybody, but yours is the best!”
Those Nashville recordings also turned out to be Roy Clark’s first Capitol sessions. After we cut four of my songs one day, we had time left over on the session. Ken said, “Why don’t we have Roy do something?” Ken and some Capitol people had seen our opening in Vegas, and they were quite impressed with him. He recorded “Black Sapphire” that day and then cut “Under the Double Eagle” with the leftover time we had the following day. The Capitol brass loved what they heard, and the two instrumentals became the two sides of his debut Capitol single.
I remember telling Hank Thompson one time how I appreciated him for his thoughtfulness in giving me a platform to launch my career. I said, “There’s just no way to ever repay you, but I wish there was.”
“There’s one way,” Hank said. “You can do it for someone else.”
Hank gave me an opportunity to get started in the business, and I paid it forward by giving Roy a shot. By the time he became a big country star and was co-hosting Hee Haw with my old friend Buck Owens, I was bursting with pride. I loved those guys and was glad to say I knew ’em when.
Another of my own singles that emerged from that Nashville trip featured “Funnel of Love” on the B-side. It wasn’t really rock or country, but was just a cool song that mixed various influences and has become a fan favorite. Some of those fans include Cyndi Lauper, who covered it in 2016, and Adele, who once told me that she was really influenced by that record. The A-side, however, was “Right or Wrong,” which turned out to be my most successful single up to that point.
“Right or Wrong” was a song I wrote at a point when I was feeling kind of alone. I felt like my life and my career were moving so fast that I would probably never find anyone to marry. It sounds crazy now, because I was only twenty-three years old at the time, but girls from Oklahoma married pretty young back then, and I was already starting to feel like the opportunity was passing me by. I couldn’t get acquainted with anybody when I was going from one town to the next on tours every night. I might dance with a guy for a song or occasionally go out to get something to eat with someone after a show, but Daddy was always around, and I had no opportunity to start a serious relationship. I was feeling lonesome when I had this thought that if I ever did find someone, I’d stick with them through everything. I’d be devoted. If I was going to commit to a man, I would commit all the way—right or wrong.
While I was thinking about all this, the phrase “right or wrong” stuck in my brain, and I began to formulate a song around it. I like to have an artist in mind when I’m writing a song. I’ll imagine who I think might be able to sing it and then write it with their voice in mind. “Right or Wrong” was meant for Brenda Lee, who was experiencing a huge amount of success at the time. “Right or Wrong” just poured out of me like it was bursting from within. It took about five minutes and it didn’t feel like work at all. I wanted Brenda to record it in the new country style that was getting popular, where you could layer background vocals and an acre of fiddles to create a lush pop-country ballad like Patsy Cline was doing.
Brenda and I had worked together on the Jubilee and several tours. Man, try following her some time! What an amazing performer. Nobody wanted to go after her because she was such a great entertainer, so we’d take turns. We had gotten to be friends by working together, so my plan was to send the song to her. I thought, Brenda will have a hit with this, and it will make me some money! Even if it just becomes the B-side to one of her hits, I’ll do pretty well with songwriter royalties on the sales of the single.
When we were getting ready for the Nashville session, Ken asked, “Have you written anything recently?”
I shook my head. “Well, I do have this one song,” I said, “but it’s not for me to record. I’m going to send it to Brenda Lee.”
“Okay, well I’d like to hear it anyway, just for fun,” he said.
I started playing “Right or Wrong” for him, but he stopped me after about a minute.
“Oh, no you’re not sending that to Brenda,” Ken said. “That’s a hit song and you’re going to record it at our session tomorrow.” Ken and I both thought it could be a hit, but I had a hard time imagining myself singing it. He convinced me it was the right way to go. “Besides,” he said, “Brenda has plenty of hits, so you don’t need to give yours away to her, too!” To this day, I don’t know if Brenda ever knew I wrote that song for her.
“Right or Wrong” became my first T
op 10 hit since my duet with Billy Gray in 1954, and my first as a solo artist. After “Let’s Have a Party,” Capitol was really pushing me to aim for crossover songs. It was a complete 180 degree turn from the “country only” decision Daddy and I had made with Ken, but unexpected successes have a way of changing plans. They figured, the more often I could cross over to the pop chart, the more records they could sell. Consequently, “Right or Wrong” was kind of a new sound for me with the luxurious bed of backing vocals and strings. It worked, and the song crossed over to hit number 29 on the pop charts. Instead of simplifying things, now I could add “pop ballads” to rockabilly and country as another genre I was attempting to balance.
In the fall of 1961, Capitol released another album, titled Right or Wrong, to capitalize on the success of the single. That’s still one of my favorite albums because it was the first one I released with country on one side and rock on the other. It captures the range of my musical interests at that time. The cover of the album shows me wearing a corset. I remember when I went to the photo shoot. They put that thing on me and cinched my twenty-inch waist down to eighteen. I said, “Okay, where’s the dress?”
“Oh, there’s not a dress,” somebody said. “We’re just going to take some pictures of you in this, which will have a soft and sexy look on the album.”
All I could think was, No dress! No wonder I have a reputation as a bad girl!
After “Right or Wrong” became a hit single, I realized why that song flowed out of me so easily when I was writing it. I was sued by the publishers of another song that was very popular at the time called “Wake the Town and Tell the People.” The whole first line of my song was, note for note, the same as that song. It wasn’t at all intentional, but that melody must have crept into my mind because I was hearing “Wake the Town” so much on the radio.
Every Night Is Saturday Night Page 15