Jackie Shane: the life of soul music’s first transgender star
“It was like a tornado coming through the place,” the soul singer Eric Mercury said when recalling Jackie Shane’s show at Toronto’s Holiday Tavern. The place was abuzz with adulation, and the walls were dripping with sweat, but Mercury clarifies, “It wasn’t hot in there, except for what Jackie was putting down.” They say that if the performer is having a good time, then the audience will too. Shane wasn’t just having a good time, she was putting it all on the line. This was the culmination of a long journey towards liberation.
Shane was born in Nashville in 1940. A passion for music and performance was evident from an early age. With her mother’s permission, she would perform in a wig and dress at local functions, but the oppression in the “Jim Crown South“ was readily apparent. So, at the tender age of 13, she joined a travelling carnival. By the time she hit Cornwall, Ontario, in 1959, she finally felt “free“.
“Baby, do what you want, just know what you’re doing,“ she told NPR shortly before her passing in 2019. “As long as you don’t force your will and your way on anyone else, live your life because ain’t nobody sanctified and holy.” This outlook was accepted in Ontario, and Shane became a celebrated member of the soul scene. Her performances were noted for the sheer passion on display. Accounts of her whirlwind force were commonplace, and she was whisked up in this wave of success herself, heading off to Montreal to seed her positive influence there.
One night, while stage-side at the famed Esquire Show Bar, Frank Motley and his Motley Crew band invited her up to sing. The performance was a triumph, and soon, Shane was solidified as the group’s lead singer. She toured with the band and was celebrated as a star pretty much wherever she played. A recording career lay ahead. However, her hit single, 1962’s ‘Any Other Way’, in some ways prognosticated her failure to break the mainstream. Although ostensibly about a break-up, the notion of bracing slings and arrows but defiantly asserted in a chorus of sorts that you “wouldn’t have it any other way” rang true to what she faced in her life. This double-meaning is clearly hinted at in the line, “Tell her that I’m happy/tell her that I’m gay”.
At the time, much of the reporting on Shane referred to her as a man in androgynous attire and make-up, while other reports mislabelled her as a drag queen. In fact, it took until 2017 for someone to ask her straight and establish that she identified as a trans woman. This predicament was never an easy one for her to manage, and she refused to yield to it, always striving to be herself and retain autonomy over her life and position.
The industry wanted to be able to neatly box her talents, but she remains steadfastly individual. “Nobody was going to buy me or change me for a dollar,“ she proclaimed. And so, a drift towards obscurity began in the late 1960s, and by 1971, she had lost touch with her bandmates and moved to Los Angeles. She turned down an offer from George Clinton to join Funkadelic and decided to live a more quiet, family life, caring for her mother.
Her work now stands as a first-person document of life as a trans person in the 1960s. She does this in such a naturalistic and prescient way that it can recalibrate your thinking on what it means to be trans, devoid of any noise. It now boldly survives her and her glowing singularity. As she told Elio Iannacci shortly before her passing: “Tell everyone Jackie’s coming home and tell them to not let any of my work fade away!“
