Cordell Jackson born 15 July 1923

Cordell Jackson (July 15, 1923 – October 14, 2004) was an American guitarist thought to be the first woman to produce, engineer, arrange and promote music on her own rock and roll music label.

She was born Cordell Miller in Pontotoc, Mississippi, where her father led a string band, the Pontotoc Ridge Runners. As a child she learned guitar, piano, and double bass, and soon began performing 
in her father's band and on radio in Tupelo. She married William Jackson in 1943, and settled in Memphis, Tennessee, where she joined the Fisher Air Craft Band and wrote songs. After installing recording equipment in her home, she recorded demo records for Sam Phillips before he set up Sun Records. Unable to break into the Sun label's stable of male artists, she received the advice and assistance of RCA Records' Chet Atkins in forming this new label to release her music.

                             

Jackson created Moon Records in 1956, to record her own single, "Beboppers Christmas" b/w "Rock and Roll Christmas. She was soon in the business of releasing rockabilly singles by others. The best-known Moon act, Allen Page and the Big Four, originally came to Memphis to audition for Sun. Jackson says, 

"They aimed for the Sun and ended up on the Moon!" [Kicks magazine] Allen is best known for the moderately popular single, "Dateless Night," written by Jackson, and "She's the One That's Got It." The Big Four enter rock & roll history, at least as a footnote, as an early favourite and small influence on the Fab Four.

Locally active in Memphis through the 70s and 80s, Jackson worked up a humorous persona called Maxie Pearl, the alter-ego of Minnie Pearl, who chased money instead of men; recorded a novelty song called "Football Widow" which still gets local airplay in Memphis during the football season, and produced a Contemporary Christian radio show. But she received more national attention -- and international attention, within the European rockabilly scene --when the 80s rockabilly and roots rock revival caught up with her.

Tav Falco's Panther Burns and Alex Chilton helped create new interest in her career in the 1980s when they began covering some of her Moon label's old singles such as "Dateless Night", a song she originally wrote in the 1950s for Florida artist Allen Page. Jackson then began playing occasional shows in the 1980s with her signature red Hagstrom electric guitar as a solo artist in Memphis, Hoboken, New York, and Chicago nightclubs. She recorded new material on her label with Memphis musicians Colonel Robert Morris and Bob Holden, becoming known as a "rock-and-roll granny" solo guitar instrumentalist. She appeared in 1991 and 1992 on national talk shows like Late Night with David Letterman and in a television commercial duelling with rockabilly artist Brian Setzer on guitar.

In the late 1990s, Cordell co-wrote and played with the Rockabilly icon, Colonel Robert Morris in Memphis. Colonel Robert also helped edit the book based on her life and career.

Her Moon Records label was the oldest continuously operating label in Memphis at the time of her death.. The 50s Rock on the Moon of Memphis, Tennessee: An Oddity, a compilation album of the label's 1950s singles, was released on vinyl in the early 1980s and was later sold on compact disc until her death. The original 1950s vinyl singles compiled on that album have been displayed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.

She also released video singles through her label in the 1990s, including "Football Widow" and filmmaker Dan Rose's production of "The Split." Her marketing of her own video singles, as opposed to marketing them in multiple-song video collections, is reputed to be another first in her innovative lifetime of doing things her own way, bucking the trends of standard industry practice.

Cordell appeared in a Budweiser commercial where she interrupts Brian Setzer during his rehearsal, to teach him a fast lesson on how to play rock-and-roll guitar. Had a role as "Bathroom Lady" in the 1992 film The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag. On January 23, 1995, Cordell Jackson sent a letter to then Moon Records requesting them to cease the use of the name Moon Records, thus prompting the New York-based ska label to add the "ska" portion to their current name Moon Ska Records.

Jackson's only solo full-length album to date, Cordell Jackson — Live in Chicago was released on Bughouse Records in 1997. Jackson remained something of an icon; a cherished and colourful character on the Memphis music scene; she opened her house for tours every August. She made a cameo appearance in the film Great Balls of Fire, and continued to flout conventions up to her death in Memphis on October 14, 2004, aged 81.

(Edited from Wikipedia & Steamiron.com)