Remembering Cordell Jackson, the Forgotten Woman Behind Famed Sun Records

Most people know about Memphis, Tennessee’s Sun Records and its impressive musical roster of Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and others, but fewer fans know about Cordell Jackson, the oft forgotten woman behind the famed record label.

Because, in reality, Sam Phillips didn’t create his legendary recording studio out of thin air. Before he established the label on February 1, 1952, he was cutting demos in Jackson’s home with her gear and her know-how.

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Cordell Jackson, The (Not So) Silent Innovator

Despite her relatively quiet presence in rock and roll history, Mississippi native Cordell Jackson was anything but timid. She picked up guitar, piano, harmonica, and double bass as a child, much to the chagrin of some of her male relatives. “When I picked up the guitar, I could see it in their eyes,” Jackson once said (via her obituary in the New York Times). “I looked right at ‘em and said, ‘I do.’”

Jackson eventually settled down in Memphis, Tennessee, with her husband, William Jackson. She worked as a riveter during WWII and pursued music on the side throughout the late 1940s. Her style of guitar playing was fast, abrasive, and bold—essentially, it was rockabilly before it adopted its name. As she once told The Tulsa World in 1992, “If what I’m doing now is rock n’ roll or rockabilly or whatever, then I was doing it when Elvis was a one-year-old.”

Unfortunately, not even Jackson’s raucous playing was enough to separate her from the world in which she lived. Women simply weren’t cutting rock and roll records at this time. Heartbroken country, sure, but mind-blowing rock instrumentals? Not a chance. This overt sexism within the music industry also led to her estrangement from Sam Phillips and erasure from Sun Records’ founding history.

The Woman Behind Sun Records

Although Cordell Jackson was the one who helped Sun Records founder Sam Phillips cut his earliest demos, when the time came for Phillips to establish his label, he deemed Jackson’s gender too controversial. Sun Records’ roster was entirely dominated by male artists, and consequently, they rejected each of Jackson’s multiple submissions to join the roster she arguably helped create.

RCA Records representative and country musician Chet Atkins encouraged Jackson to do what she did best: push back against the status quo and do it herself. So, that’s precisely what she did. Jackson founded Moon Records (a not-so-subtle reference to the label that rejected her) and served as a producer, engineer, songwriter, and promoter out of her living room studio.

But neither she nor the artists she recorded were as successful as their other Memphis colleagues, and Jackson had to add day jobs to her lengthy to-do list. She worked as an interior decorator, a radio DJ, a junk shop owner, and more to make ends meet.

The Cordell Jackson Revival

Her career saw a stunning resurgence in the 1980s. Jackson, at that point in her golden years, wowed audiences with her diminutive, elderly appearance and ripping guitar playing. During an appearance on the WFMU radio show “The Hound,” host Jim Marshall called Jackson’s playing “some of the most vicious, nasty rock n’ roll guitar I’ve ever heard in my life.” From there, she started to book more on-stage appearances and television cameos in her 60s and 70s.

“I like to say I’m an overnight success, but it’s been a 42-year night,” Jackson said in a 1990 interview. “I’ve had 42 straight years of hard knocks. I was the only woman who even thought of making a record for radio play. I’ve had a lifetime of hearing adults say, ‘Little girls don’t play the guitar,’ but they do. I’m sweet and loving and simple, but there’s a wild side to me.” Jackson died at 81 from pancreatic cancer on October 14, 2004.

Photo by Tannen Maury/EPA/Shutterstock