Episode forty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "I Gotta Know" by Wanda Jackson, and the links between rockabilly and the Bakersfield Sound. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Bacon Fat" by Andre Williams.



Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

My main source for this episode is Wanda Jackson's autobiography, Every Night is Saturday Night.

I also made reference to the website Women in Rock & Roll's First Wave, and I am very likely to reference that again in future episodes on Wanda Jackson and others.

I mentioned the podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, and its episode on "Okie From Muskogee". Several other episodes of that podcast touch tangentially on people mentioned in this episode too -- the two-parter on Buck Owens and Don Rich, the episode on Ralph Mooney, and the episode on the Louvin Brothers all either deal with musicians who played on Wanda's records, with Ken Nelson, or both. Generally I think most people who enjoy this podcast will enjoy that one as well.

And this compilation collects most of Jackson's important early work.

Errata

I say Jackson's career spans more than the time this podcast covers. I meant in length of time – this podcast covers sixty-two years, and Jackson's career so far has lasted seventy-one – but the ambiguity could suggest that this podcast doesn't cover anything prior to 1948.

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Transcript

Today we're going to talk about someone whose career as a live performer spans more than the time that this podcast covers. Wanda Jackson started performing in 1948, and she finally retired from live performance in March 2019, though she has an album coming out later this year. She is only the second performer we've dealt with who is still alive and working, and she has the longest career of any of them.

Wanda Jackson is, simply, the queen of rockabilly, and she's a towering figure in the genre.

Jackson was born in Oklahoma, but as this was the tail-end of the great depression, she and her family migrated to California when she was small, as stragglers in the great migration that permanently changed California.

The migration of the Okies in the 1930s is a huge topic, and one that I don't have the space to explain in this podcast -- if you're interested in it, I'd recommend as a starting point listening to the episode of the great country music podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones on "Okie From Muskogee", which I'll link in the show notes. The very, very, shortened version is that bad advice as to best farming practices created an environmental disaster on an almost apocalyptic scale across the whole middle of America, right at the point that the country was also going through the worst economic disaster in its history. As entire states became almost uninhabitable, three and a half million people moved from the Great Plains to elsewhere in the US, and a large number of them moved to California, where no matter what state they actually came from they became known as "Okies".

But the thing to understand about the Okies for this purpose is that they were a despised underclass -- and as we've seen throughout this series, members of despised underclasses often created the most exciting and innovative music.

The music the Okies who moved to California made was far more raucous than the country music that was popular in the Eastern states, and it had a huge admixture of blues and boogie woogie in it. Records like Jack Guthrie's "Oakie Boogie", for example, a clear precursor of rockabilly:

[Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, "Oakie Boogie"]

We talked way back in episode three about Western Swing and the distinction in the thirties and forties between country music and western musi