With my band, Bobby Poe and the Poe Kats, and other musicians.
When I got back from Tokyo in April of 1959, I did a three-week run of shows at the Showboat in Las Vegas with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Not only did they play their own sets, but they also served as my backing band when I did my part of the show. Bob even stayed out on stage with his fiddle and trademark cigar. I was really excited to have the chance to play with Bob and his legendary band. After all, this was the group I was so impressed with as a child when Mother and Daddy took me to those dances in Los Angeles. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Bob’s band played a big role in planting the seed in my mind that I wanted to be a girl singer one day.
As exciting as the idea of performing with The Texas Playboys might have been, the reality was not exactly ideal. Those guys were an amazing Western swing band, but they couldn’t get the feel for “Fujiyama Mama” or “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad” to save their lives. It was awful. I wish I could sugarcoat it or put a positive spin on it because I wanted it to be amazing. But it was just absolutely terrible. That was the moment I decided it was time to do something about my stage show.
During those first few years of touring, I played with pickup bands wherever I performed. Sometimes, if I was on a package show, there was a house band that performed with us at the various tour stops. Other times, the regular band at a nightclub where I was playing might step in to back me up. In some instances, the show’s booker might put together a group of players from the local musicians’ union. I met and worked with some great players in those years, but you never knew what you were getting until you arrived at the venue.
I remember one time I arrived at a club for a rehearsal with the house band before that night’s show. When we pulled up the guys were out having a cigarette in the parking lot. They told me they were all set up, had tuned their instruments, and were ready to go when I was. I was impressed by their professionalism and decided I liked these boys immediately. We started swapping stories like musicians do and, for some reason, I wound up saying, “I’ll tell you one instrument I just can’t stand, and that is a dang accordion!” Everybody laughed and we went on talking for a few minutes.
Finally, the leader of the group said, “Well, let’s head on in and get started.”
“That sounds great,” I said, “but I didn’t even get you boys’ names and what instruments you play yet.”
They went around the circle, and the last fellow said, “My name’s Chet and I’m the accordion player.”
Whoops. Like I said, you never knew what you were going to get. That was a good band, and ol’ Chet was a good accordion player, but it just never was my thing.
Even though I ran into some really good pickers, I just as often encountered some real disasters. Sometimes we couldn’t get into town in time to rehearse, but there were plenty of instances where we were stuck with a group that just didn’t want to rehearse. It’s embarrassing to me to go onstage with a band that’s not any good. My audience has paid their hard-earned money to see a good show, and I want to give them the very best.
By late 1957 I was getting tired of the endless gamble of using pickup bands. Daddy and I talked to my agent, Jim Halsey, who suggested I find a good group and take them on the road with me. The challenge was that I needed guys who could play both country and rock and roll, but he said he knew of a band that played extensively around Kansas and Oklahoma that would fit the bill. Halsey introduced me to Bobby Poe and the Poe Kats, and we hit it off. They started touring with me and opening my shows. Then they would back me up for my set.
In addition to Bobby Poe, the band included teenagers Vernon Sandusky on lead guitar, Joe Brawley on drums, and a black piano player named “Big” Al Downing. This was a time when you hardly ever saw interracial bands outside of the jazz world. I wasn’t raised to be prejudiced, and it didn’t bother Daddy at all. Mother, however, was from a different time and a different mind-set. She was a good-hearted person, but there wasn’t much of an opportunity for cross-racial interactions in her world. She was polite, but she didn’t really know what to make of this new situation, which was pretty unusual in 1957. I remember the first time the band came by the house for a rehearsal. Mother was a little horrified that the neighbors might see Al coming in and out of our house. With time, however, she came to love him, and she was able to move past some of those unfortunate attitudes of an earlier time.
It wasn’t always easy for Al when we were out on the road as a mixed-race band. America was a segregated country in the 1950s, and he often couldn’t eat in the same restaurants and cafés where the rest of us did. He’d tell the other guys what he wanted to eat, and they’d bring his food out where he’d eat in the car. He couldn’t use the same restrooms or drink out of the same water fountain. It was heartbreaking for me to get a glimpse into a world I hadn’t really had to think much about before. It made me mad to think that this great guy would be treated so disrespectfully for absolutely no reason but the color of his skin.
I worked at quite a few NCO clubs on military bases in that era, and I recall a particular show we were doing up in Montana or Wyoming. We didn’t have any kind of road manager or anything, so the guys in the band set up all the speakers and gear before opening the show with at least a thirty-minute set before I came out. The manager at this one NCO club hadn’t paid any attention when the guys were setting up and doing their set, but when I went on he came out to see how it was going. That’s when he noticed Al at the piano. Before long, this guy worked his way up to the bandstand and got my attention.
“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.