The Excellence of Jackie Shane

Note: To read this article properly, listen to the correct music while reading. This could include Jackie Shane, Little Richard, Billy Wright, Esquerita, or Big Mama Thorton. For a Spotify playlist, click here.

TORONTO, CANADA, 1967.

When Jackie Shane sang, everybody listened.

And on the bottom floor of an old brick insurance company, inside Toronto’s famous Sapphire Tavern, she was singing.

It was 1967 and Shane was at the peak of her career. Her hit “Any Other Way” was on radios across Canada, “Tell her that I’m happy/Tell her that I’m gay/Tell her I wouldn’t have it/Any other way.’ In LA, she performed with a cross-dressing Etta James Revue, and in Nashville, she played drums for Jimi Hendrix. In Toronto, she could sell out any venue in town.

The label booked her out for a whole week at the Sapphire. This was her old stomping grounds, where she’d made a name for herself as a queer, Black teenage transplant from Nashville playing the types of shows that people still talk about fifty years later. It was a massive gothic bank building on Yonge St, the rock n’ roll district in the middle of a conservative Canadian city. At its prime, the Sapphire hosted Jackie Shane once a week, where she could make the whole building shake from the bottom floor. She was one of the best blues singers Toronto had ever seen, and when they recorded her that week, they recorded her in her element– Black, trans, and excellent. She could go wherever she wanted.

In the middle of the set, Shane takes a pause, and lets the bass walk behind her. She takes note of the crowd, and laughs. She drinks some water, and clears her throat. It was 1967, and the entire Sapphire Tavern was following Jackie Shane’s every word.

“You know, when I’m walkin’ down Yonge Street, you won’t believe this, but you know some of them funny people have the nerve to point the finger at me and grin and smile and whisper. But you know, that don’t worry Jackie, because I know I look good.

And every Monday morning I laugh and grin on my way to the bank, because I got mine. I look good, I got money and everything else that I need. You know what my slogan is? Baby, do what you want, just know what you’re doing. As long as you don’t force your will and your way on anybody else, live your life, because ain’t nobody sanctified and holy.

You know, though, this is the closest to Jesus Christ some of you will ever get. You should travel with me, baby, you’d think Jesus Christ had come down and walked this Earth again, the multitude that follows me is so great. ”

It’s 2023, and I’ve joined the multitudes behind Jackie Shane. I’m here to spread the message. I don’t know anything about religion, but I can guess that this is the closest thing to the Bible I’ll ever write.

Nazareth or Nashville: The Origins of Jackie Shane

Hey, can I tell you a story?

About Nashville, Tennessee?

That’s history

On a road named Jefferson St

- - - - Back In the Day, Marion James

JEFFERSON ST, NASHVILLE, TN- A Union Army fort on one side, and a camp of runaway former enslaved people on the other— this how Jefferson St started. Since, it has been home to a historic Black community in Nashville. In its prime, Jefferson St boasted three HBCUs, dozens of Black-owned businesses, and beautiful churches. It’s most known for some of the best American music ever made. It was Nashville, but it wasn’t country music. At one point, Jefferson St’s clubs hosted Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and Etta James. Locals like Herbert Hunter and Marion James, the Queen of the Blues, that built and maintained a massively talented, dynamic, and connected music community. Jimi Hendrix lived there for a while, saying, “”…That’s where I learned to play, really, in Nashville.” And this is where Jackie Shane learned, too.

As a teenager, Jackie Shane lived with Marion James, the mother of Jefferson St, who would also have been hosting whoever was touring the Jefferson St clubs at the time. Living there, Shane would’ve been exposed to the whole scene. She watched as soul music, the blues, and RnB were reborn and perfected in Nashville. Here, she picked up her lifelong musical inspiration– BB King’s guitar, the grace of Inez and the Caravans, the perfected eccentricity of Yma Sumac, and the drama of James Brown and Joe Tex.

“What is the cause today? What can be. If the people want it. As Christ said, I didn’t come here to solve your problems, you must do that. If you want things to change, you must change them.”

By the time Jackie Shane arrived on Jefferson St, she had been wearing dresses since she was five years old, and performing since she was thirteen. Shane said, “[T]hey wondered how I could keep the high heels on with my feet so much smaller than the shoe. I started dressing (as a female) when I was five. I would press forward and would, just like Mae West, throw myself from side to side. What I am simply saying is I could be no one else.”

When an interviewer asked her if she would dare perform in Downtown Nashville dressed in heels and a dress, she responded, “I don’t have any restrictions on me. I’ve never had a problem [in Nashville]. I am what I am. I don’t have to add or subtract anything. It’s just, ‘Yes ma’am, no ma’am.’ You would know if you met me. I’m not like anyone else. It’s always, ‘Yes ma’am, no ma’am.’ I can wear anything I want. It’s very natural because that’s the way I was born.” In Nashville, Jackie Shane learned how to drum, how to dance, and how to sing. But she was also a teenager, figuring out how she wanted to dress and who she wanted to be.

Music has always been shaped by queer people, especially on Jefferson St. Little Richard, the iconic queer King of Rock n’ Roll, came out of Nashville. A lot of young Black queer performers in the South, including Little Richard, started their careers doing drag and performing in ‘tent shows’, sometimes called revues, circuses, or minstrel shows.

Revues were sort of concerts, sort of circuses. They would travel around the South, and if they came to your town, you would go to the stadium, buy some popcorn, and watch them in big stands. These sorts of revues have a mixed history- in Southern white-performed Blackface minstrel shows, the point was to mock Black people. Queerness was twisted with insipid racism; tranness was a way of proving the strangeness, inhumanness of Black people. But revues were also just entertainment, and people just did what people do. They were wildly popular, and offered a place for communities to socialize. They were a center for Black performance communities and opportunities. Jackie Shane was in one called The Jerry Jackson Revue.

The Jerry Jackson Revue (Shane at bottom, second from right)

Jackie Shane described this photo of the Jerry Jackson Revue by saying, “The boys, that was a singing group, the girls are in a chorus line. TV Mama isn’t here—they called her that because she was big and fat. She stripped. But she isn’t here….Carboo would take her snake—a big boa constrictor—for a walk, like a dog. The man at the far left is Iron Jaw. He chewed glass. He said that he could pick a table up with his mouth. He said that he could lift a table with a woman and a goat on it—with his mouth…”

“Female impersonators were featured in many of the rhythm-and-blues package shows that toured the North and Deep South, scoring hits in the most unlikely places—Mobile, Alabama, for example.” These shows occupied an edge-of-society kind of entertainment, “Pompadoured, effeminate, and raunchily funny” (Hazlift). A lot of music and trends originated in revue shows. They were popular, daring, and full of talented people. And yet, these shows and these performers have gotten very little credit for their influence.

Later in life, Jackie Shane didn’t talk about the revue much. She didn’t shame it, and she performed in bigger revues later in life, but it wasn’t her goal. Jackie Shane was a singer, and an icon. She was glamorous, deserving of limousines and pearls. This sort of recognition wasn’t something you could get staying in the queer circles at the time.

“I was accepted because I was who I am. I’ve never been anyone but Ms. Shane. I’ve been Jackie all of my life. I’m a person. I’m here, just like everyone else.”

America’s music scene was designed to strip Black artists of opportunities for traditional wealth and success. Prodigies of Jefferson St- Little Richard, Marion James– are hailed as the King of Rock n’ Roll, and the Queen of the Blues. And yet, during their careers, Black artists, and Black queer artists, were never offered the audiences, venues, or opportunities that they were due, because of the “vestiges of Jim Crow” that were “still very much alive in the music industry,” said Tanisha Ford, a history professor at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Nashville is known for white, country music. Elvis is the King of Rock n’ Roll. Shane said, “it’s the evil creatures that crawl around in the South. They’re ridiculous, they’re stupid. I remember, this group came from this recording company, and they wanted to record me. And we were set up at the recording studio, and they had the audacity to want me to sing on this European boy’s record, and give him the credit, and I got up and left.”

In the South, the lack of opportunities for Black artists compounded with a deep, and dangerous, racism. Tina Turner, Nina Simone, Josephine Baker, Eartha Kitts- all Black women left the US to be recognized for their talent before they ever found success here. When asked why she left, Josephine Baker said, “I ran away from home. I ran away from St. Louis, and then I ran away from the United States of America because of that terror of discrimination, that horrible beast which paralyzes one’s very soul and body,” Baker said.

Jackie Shane was a Black woman who wanted a career bigger than the revues, or Jefferson St. One day in Nashville, she saw a Black man get beat up by a white man and left in a dumpster. So, as a teenager, Black, queer, and alone, she left.

Tell her that I’m happy/ Tell her that I’m gay Tell her I wouldn’t have it/Any other way

– Any Other Way, 1962

“I’ve had people tell me that when I sing, when you look at me, I can’t breathe. I tell them to go outside, because you haven’t learned to let it go, to let it take you over. I could explain to them: it’s supposed to touch you.”

YONGE ST, TORONTO, CANADA- The Sapphire Tavern was swinging. There were Canadian musicians trying to make it big, go-go dancers, Americans trying to prove themselves, and endless cocky trumpet players. It was the 60s, and Toronto was trying to figure itself out. The city was largely white, and conservative enough that all the nightclubs closed at midnight. But downtown, Yonge St was a boulevard of rebellion. There were nightclubs and restaurants and Americans, all trying to have a good time. The flashiest performances of this whole scene were at ‘Saphire A-Go-Go’ nights, where Jackie Shane was a regular headliner.

Together with the Frank Motley Band, Jackie Shane taught Toronto how to play funky, how to sing the blues, and how to move to a fatback bass. In that band were some of the best in the business: Jimmy Butler on the drums, Curley Bridges on the piano, Larry Ellis on the bass, and King Herbert on the tenor saxophone. Frank Motley was known for playing two trumpets simultaneously; the drummer and bass player were world class. In rehearsal, Shane would sit down and play what she wanted to hear on the drums. Then she would turn to the saxophone and sing out her mouth what she wanted him to sound like. Then she would turn around, and sing.

Jackie Shane said often, “Most people are planted in someone else’s soil, which means they’re a carbon copy. I say to them: ‘Uproot yourself. Get into your own soil. You may be surprised who you really are.’ ” When Jackie Shane moved to Toronto, she grew up. She knew how to draw a crowd into her, how to get them dancing or crying. She would stop in the middle of her show and deliver a full sermon, and she had everyone on the tip of her sequined glove. Her outfits were always immaculate, and surrounded by an entourage of beautiful men and women. At the time, Canada was obsessed with Black rhythm and blues, and Shane was the face of that scene.

A lot of Canadians tell the story of Jackie Shane with self-righteous pride; Jackie Shane, the icon who chose a liberal Canada as her unprejudiced home. The racism wasn’t as overt as the US, but Canada was still deeply segregated. Shane talked about getting harassed by the police- “Those creatures on the force, they were gay but will never come out. They feel they’ve got to hide, so you should too. They would see me in a motor car with these fine boys and, of course, they’re drooling. They would stop us and try to get these boys to say that I was soliciting. The boys would say you’re wrong. We’re with Jackie because we want to be.”

[Did you have any trans role models?] I didn’t have any! I was always teaching someone else. I mean, I didn’t have anyone besides my mother to take me by the hand and say, “I want you to look at this.” My grandmama and my mother, and my grandfather were the people that made me the person I am today. They didn’t make it, you know, “It’s going to be easy.” They simply said, “You’re gonna have to know to make your way through this room of people. Which means, your brain is what you must depend on.”

Jackie Shane’s realness and glamor was immediately apparent to everyone that met her. She told Zachary Drucker a story about getting a letter from the draft board “It was fun. [My friend] and I were devils. We got ready and headed down, and I stood up, and I said to this guy, ‘You people sent me this letter. I’m here.’ They were calling others in. I said, ‘Hey, look, my friend, you sent for me! I didn’t come here voluntarily.’ As we were leaving, they were peeping out behind the doors. I really gave them quite a time. I knew how. I said, ‘Now, here’s what it will be. I’m never up before 12. And I will have to have my room designed to suit me.’ I had so much fun that day! They were laughing when I left. [What were you wearing?] I wore a floor-length black dress, a broach, earrings, and a couple bracelets.” She brought people into her life, making the punchline of the joke the absurd and ridiculous world that couldn’t comprehend her.

Toronto wasn’t perfect, or equal in any measure. But in Toronto, Jackie Shane was the only one. There weren’t that many Black, queer people, so there weren’t as many preconceived notions. Toronto was trying to define itself, thirsty for talent and personality. Jackie Shane showed up, and she was excellent. She was glamorous, talented, and confident. She was real, she was undeniable, and she was Jackie. Toronto couldn’t help but love her. One of her old band members said, “[She] was [LGBT], but [she] didn’t flaunt it. [She] was [LGBT] , but people were falling in love with [her]. [LGBT] was a whole different thing for Jackie Shane.”

It is so, so hard to be as gracious as Jackie Shane. She was performing in a white, conservative town, and all she shared with them was her excellence. She said it better- “At first, there were people who are ignorant and talk and talk and don’t know what they’re talking about. They were curious, but when they got to know me and we grew to love to one another — I loved them first. I had to. I could not allow myself to be angry.”

There’s a moment at the beginning of something like a concert. A moment when a marginalized person presents themself with all the pride and talent they have, and they still don’t have all of the power in the room. They could still be clocked, punched, or heckled. Jackie Shane would walk out, in a dress and all of her makeup, and the whole place would stop, and take a breath.

Shane’s mother took her to the revue and “from that time on, I knew, I was wonderful, and had been blessed. I had never allowed anyone to make me feel insane other than that. I am a blessing.”

“I remember at this club, one night, they had a table there by the side of the stage, and there were two guys there, and they were ready to get down and dirty. I noticed them, and I looked at them, and I didn’t take my eyes off of them. I don’t play. Frank called me up. As I went, I kept looking at them, and I kept my eyes on them, daring them to move, as if to say, “If you try anything, I will kill you.” And I went up on the stage and did what I do. They left soon after.”

Most of the time though, Jackie Shane won the crowd over. One of her band members talked about watching her pole dance before a show, and realizing that, “[She] was gifted, and deep in [her] craft..She was a unique person, and also [she] knew how to be free around other people.” She was excellent- she was trans, and Black, and proud, and she was excellent.

Toronto was obsessed with Jackie Shane. She was known for being flocked, an entourage of beautiful men and women on all sides. She headlined all of Toronto’s venues and won the city over, but she never let herself become completely absorbed. Jackie Shane was bigger than Toronto. So she left.

Can’t you see you’re my sunshine, baby? You Are My Sunshine, 1967

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, 1965-1970

“Everything I buy, I pay cash for it. [I saw that a car dealership I was passing] had this limousine—it was the same make that the president had at the time—and they had it on this platform that slowly went around. I stopped my chauffeur and I said, “We’re coming back in the morning, and I’m gonna buy that.” We stayed up and then drove to the dealer, and I put an amount of money in my attaché case, and I had my chauffeur stand over to the side, holding the attaché case. I sit down at the desk. On both sides of the street was nothing but car dealers. I sat down and told the dealer, I’m ready to trade in my motor car, which is paid for, and I beckoned for my chauffeur to bring the case over. I unlock it and I turn to him, and there’s cash. I said, ‘That is as far as I am going to go.’ And he said, ‘I’ll have to talk to my boss.’ I got up and started looking across the street at these other car dealers. He came back with mine. As me and my chauffeur drove away, he said, ‘Jackie you’re too much.’ I said, ‘No, no, no, dear, in this world, you can’t be too much when you’re conducting business. You have to let them know how far you’re willing to go.’ My way of life is simply doing my thing, not somebody else’s.”

– Jackie Shane to Zachary Drucker in 2018

You don’t want people in your business—not even your sister or your brother or anyone. Your business should always be yours, and you should handle it properly. I don’t allow people to tell me what to do. You can suggest, but don’t ever try to tell me what to do. I don’t care who you are.

Jackie Shane traveled with twenty trunks. She lived in luxury hotels and was driven around only in limousines. She was sharing stages with the Temptations, T.B. Walker, and the Upsetters. From Toronto to LA, Jackie Shane was breaking ground, shaking up minds and asses.

There’s only one TV recording of Jackie Shane during this period. She was invited to perform on American Bandstand but refused because of its segregationist policies, and threw a fundraiser concert for Dr. King’s Freedom March instead. She dropped the Ed Sullivan Show when they insisted she remove her makeup. But finally, on WLAT’s Night Train, an all-Black RnB and soul show, she made her TV Debut singing ‘Walkin’ the Dog’.

Besides TV, she started to get more serious about recording. She recorded Cruel, Cruel World and New Way of Lovin’, both released in 1969. New Way of Lovin’ is fast- she scream/sings along with a drum set that sounds fit to fall apart and a tenor sax trying to catch up.

I’ve got a new way of lovin’ babe

Want me to know you inside outside

Let me teach you tonight

Cruel, Cruel World is one of Shane’s only truly sad songs. It starts out calm and slow, but then her voice catches. By the end of the song, a lonely saxophone comes in, and she belts.

See, what you see

Come on

I’m standing here

Can’t you see I’m all alone,

Oh, baby

help me, help me

Come on, I need someone

Who I can call my very own

In some ways, they would be the best songs she ever released- emotional, lonely, implicitly queer, and the product of a matured musician “I’m an R&B singer, not a mimic,” she said. “I sing the blues. I love the blues. I understand the blues.”

But she was struggling to find a good band, and good management. She was struggling to get respected in the mainstream scene. But listening to these songs, her potential to break into something new, into something truly her own, is bursting out. She could’ve gone anywhere.

But in 1971, at the height of her career, Jackie Shane disappeared. Her mother got sick, and she went home. As far as we know, she never performed again.

“I needed to step back from it,” Shane said. “Every night, two or three shows and concerts. I just felt I needed a break from it…I don’t know. Because it takes a lot out of you. I give all I can. You are really worn out when you walk off that stage.”

In the last decade, Jackie Shane reentered the mainstream. In 2010, Elaine Banks of the Canadian Broadcasting Service interviewed all her old bandmates, trying to figure out who she was, and never succeeding in determining if she was still alive. In 2016, Doug McGowan from a recording company called the Numero Group finally found her, tracking her back to a house in Nashville, TN. Even though he never saw her- only being permitted to talk on the phone, or through the front door- McGowan got her to agree to rereleasing her album.

423 Yonge St Mural in Toronto celebrating Jackie Shane (second from bottom). “Without hope, children go astray. And we don’t want that. I would call on the adults that are intelligent in life to reach out to children, to let them know that they’re not alone, and they’re not doing anything wrong. They’re simply obeying their nature.”

In 2017, Any Other Way was released, and immediately gained a lot of attention. It won Best Historical Album of the Year at the Grammys, and like that, the flood gates were open. After thirty years, Shane was unwillingly thrust into the spotlight, with people showing up at her door and a million reporters requesting an interview. “I had been discovered,” she told The Associated Press. “It wasn’t what I wanted, but I felt good about it. After such a long time, people still cared. And now those people who are just discovering me, it’s just overwhelming.”

If you Google Jackie Shane, she is on endless lists with titles like QUEER ICONS OF THE 50s and STARS DISAPPEARED AND FOUND AGAIN– She became famous not for her voice, but for being difficult to find. Suddenly, she wasn’t a singer but a recluse, a lost talent, and a transgender icon. Jackie Shane only gave seven interviews in the last few years of her life- and so many of the questions people asked were all repetitions of those themes. In all of this attention, Jackie Shane was exaggerated, and simplified, but she was also deeply loved. A lot of people today idolize her music, her wisdom, and the representation she offers.

In all of the digging into Shane’s life in the past few decades, there are no interviews with her friends or family. There are no stories about what it was like to be a young teenage runaway in Toronto, and there are no pictures of her with even a single wrinkle. She told her story as a myth, a legend, and a singer. She said, “I went to a foreign country at fifteen and won that country over. I don’t have to tell you my accomplishments. You will see them. But it’s because I am the person I am. I’m not a phony. You may not like me, but you will respect me. What you think means nothing to me, but how you treat me is very important to me. You don’t have to be near me day after day to really absorb the creature I am. I don’t hurt people, and I’m not gonna let you hurt me, either. I say very little. Most of the people in my neighborhood have never seen me. I move in such a way that I’m out of sight, out of mind. I don’t want them trying to get close.”

“This is how I have lived for as long as I can remember. I live with my convictions. I don’t cry and moan and kick and complain. I do what I feel I should do. Not what someone says I should do, but what Jackie knows is best for Jackie. And if you don’t know what is best for you, find out. Find out by pulling away from the crowd.”

It’s natural to wonder how someone gives it all up. I don’t know what she did for thirty years in Nashville, but I think she was right to not share. She spent so long being excellent, and making good music, but when she finally got recognition, it was mostly for being trans– the one thing about herself she couldn’t control. Maybe it was lonely in Nashville, or maybe it was agonizing trying to perform. Maybe it was too lonely to be telling the world everything she was meant to be, and for nobody to be listening.

Jackie Shane was a showstopper in her time, and in ours she’s become a legend. Her music, her grace, her bravery, and her fashion are the origins for us today– our music, our fashion, and our ability to exist.

“It’s like my grandmamma would say, ‘Good things come to those who wait,’ All of the sudden it’s like people are saying, ‘Thank you, Jackie, for being out there and speaking when no one else did.’ No matter whether I initiated it or not, and I did not, this was the way that fate wanted it to be…People have come up to me and said, ‘Jackie thank you. You made it possible for me to have a life.’ That’s why I was there. My whole approach is to get you to go up against wrong. I don’t bow down. I do not get down on my knees. The lowest I go is the top of my head. This is Jackie!”

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