Wanda Lavonne Jackson was not the first woman to sing rock and roll music; but she very likely was the first white woman to release a rock and roll single, and that was an achievement in and of itself. One barely needs to scratch the surface of 1950s moral panic to recognize that the “danger” of rock and roll was its perceived threat to the moral sanctity of white womanhood. But there was Wanda, in her red fringed dresses and high heels, tearing through racy–and “race-y”–rockabilly songs with the kind of blitzkrieg energy a punk rocker would envy.
Given the time and place in which she originated–Oklahoma City in the mid-’50s–it’s unlikely that Jackson explicitly thought of herself as a feminist trailblazer, much less a transgressor of racial lines. But she didn’t need to: she broke those boundaries simply by existing. Take, for example, her 1961 version of “Hard Headed Woman.” Written by Black Rhythm & Blues songwriter Claude Demetrius and recorded, most famously, by her ex-boyfriend Elvis Presley for the King Creole