.png)
Written by: Megan Crutchley (she/her)
Jackie Shane was a black, trans woman, a performer of R&B and Soul music. Her performance style is extremely spiritual – an energy that is palpable through recordings alone, an attitude contagious through her voice and a sense of soul that can ignite a room.
She developed her unique style over her childhood and adolescence. Raised in Nashville, and living alongside blues singers, she developed a taste for music. She reports of times when she used to go to church and listen to the music, then leave as soon as the preaching began. Since childhood she had her hair long and dressed in feminine clothing. Despite the time period, Jackie had a unique experience, in which she was apparently never critiqued for being openly queer. However, one of the things Jackie did suffer was the overt racism of the US, especially in the South. The Jim Crow Laws were still in practice and segregation underway. For these reasons, in her childhood she joined a travelling carnival and partook in side shows, joined by others who felt the same way as her. However, due to the terminology of the time, they did not have the word ‘transgender’ in their vocabulary yet. At this time, she was known to have travelled with the Likes of Little Richard, and so her love for music grew, surrounded by people who seemed to accept her.
With this group, Jackie eventually came to Montreal in 1960, where one night she visited the Esquire Show bar, known to have non-stop entertainment until 3am. There she watched Frank Motley, a jazz performer who could play two trumpets at once, and was invited onstage by the saxophone player, King Herbert. Her performance solidified her as a permanent band member, and Frank Motley and the Motley Crew was formed. Frank was still the leader of the band, but Jackie became the lead singer. The band moved from jazz to R&B and Jackie’s performance style was popular with the crowd in Toronto, where they began performing regularly.
Canada, as Jackie and other members of the band said, was an easier place to make a living for black performers. In the US, there was still avid segregation and prejudices against people of colour that prevented reasonable amounts of money to be made from performing. While Toronto still had many issues around racism, with segregation still in place for example, the racism experienced was often slightly more 'covert' for performers who were treated with a little more leniency when it came to segregation laws. Hence why the band continued to play in Canada for some years, and why it attracted so many other black performers. Homophobia too, as at this time Jackie was seen by others as a gay man, with the word transgender not even being conceived yet, was rife. Jackie experienced this in the form of frequently being pulled over by police when she was seen with men, and being heckled at shows. She dealt with these issues people had with her openly and directly, having grown up in a loving and accepting household, she said that she fought hate with love – ‘I loved them first. I had to. I could not allow myself to be angry’.
She became known in Canada for her performance style: she would pause mid-song and deliver monologues that had meaning to the people she was performing to , but also linked with the content of the song. She frequently used word play in her music, to make songs her own. For example, in her song ‘Any Other Way’, the lines ‘tell her that I’m happy/ Tell her that I’m gay’ take on a different meaning in her live performances. This style of performance really suited the popular style of bar at the time – lounge bars. People listened to soul music to feel something, not only through lyrics but the music itself. The way Jackie would deliver these monologues meant every member of the audience was addressed, felt as if they were part of something bigger than themselves. It created a sense of community, if only temporarily. Jackie herself was also a spectacle – she would appear on stage with her long feminine hair, dressed in a suit, wearing makeup, her hands decked with rings and her nails long and immaculately painted. Or covered in sequins, like in her only television appearance where she sings ‘Walking the Dog’. She gave body to the performance with her confidence and people seemed to accept her extravagance as adding to the show.
One reason why Jackie Shane doesn’t have a lot of released music is due to this love for live performances. She was never signed to a record label, fearing that they would try and force her back into the closet in order to make her appeal to a bigger audience. There was a period of time where she moved to LA and she was booked out at The Sapphire to perform, and these were recorded so as to compile an album. By this time however, it was the late 60’s, and the music scene was changing. People came to clubs looking to dance, not to listen. Jackie complained this separated her from her audience – there wasn’t any room for her to connect with people or time for her to talk. She recorded one of her last songs, New Way of Loving, and then it seemed her career began to wind down. In 1969, she split from Frank Motley and the Motley Crew and by the 1970’s it seemed as if she had disappeared.
Her bandmates couldn’t trace her. She hadn’t kept in contact with anyone, and slowly her name began to get lost, with no big records of her own, only features on compilation tracks. There were rumours she had been murdered, been forced out of Canada by the government or some sort of underground group. Her old band mates report of her always having some sort of sadness to her, and attributed this to her disappearance.
It is only in the last ten years, after the making of a radio documentary called ‘I Got Mine: The Story of Jackie Shane’ that people began to properly search for her. It turns out that there was no big mystery: Jackie had left Canada to look after her mother in LA. She had kept a very low profile, wearing sunglasses in public and barely leaving the house. After her mother’s death, she retired to Nashville and that was where she stayed until her death in 2018.
In the documentary ‘I Got Mine’, her ex-band members spoke of how, if she’d had a manager and someone to guide her, she could’ve been a household name. One gives her credit as being ‘the grand[mother] of glam rock’, being one of the first performers to incorporate elements of glamour into her music. Her influence in the way she played with feminine and masculine appearances can be seen in such artists as Bowie and her extravagant clothes can be compared to later Elton John costumes. Jackie had a long and fulfilling life, seemingly happy and accepted by those around her. She always regretted having to move back to the US though, never forgetting the harm it had caused her as a black and Queer person. Her album, titled ‘Any Other Way’, a collection of her live performances and the compilation records she had released, was released in 2017. One of the lines she throws out in one of those live performances is ‘baby, do what you want, just know what you’re doing’, and that seems to sum up her life perfectly – she did what she wanted and, baby, she knew what she was doing.
Bibliography
Banks, E. (Director). (2010). I Got Mine: The Story of Jackie Shane [Motion Picture].
Darling, & Laura. (2020, February 25). Jackie Shane Part 1. Retrieved from Making Queer History: https://www.makingqueerhistory.com/articles/2020/2/24/jackie-shane-part-i
Darling, L. (2020, February 28). Jackie Shane Part II. Retrieved from Making Queer History : https://www.makingqueerhistory.com/articles/2020/2/28/jackie-shane-ii
Mcgowan, D. (2018, Fall). Jackie Shane: It's Just, 'Yes Ma'am, No Ma'am'. Southern Cultures, pp. 30-44.