Jackie Shane – Comin’ Down

24th June 2024 · 1960s, 1962, Music, Soul

Not only is this a classic Northern Soul number but Jackie Shane is one of the earliest trans performers in pop history.

Jackie Shane identified as a girl from the age of 13 and her idol was Mae West. In the late ’50s she started out performing as a man in drag – make-up, long wigs and jewellery – in her home town of Nashville.

It was a bold move at a time when many white folk in the segregated South were intolerant of people of colour, and even among her own community cross-dressing and queerness were taboo.

Keeping her alter ego secret, Jackie worked as a session drummer in Nashville, playing on tracks by R&B artists like Joe Tex, Little Willie John and Clarence Gatemouth Brown.

At the age of 20, desperate to leave prejudice behind, she joined a travelling carnival to get out of the Jim Crow South and ended up in Montreal.

Feeling free for the first time in Canada – but still presenting as a man – she eventually came out to identify publicly as a transgender woman and became a pioneer of Toronto’s queer community.

A popular performer on the city’s soul scene, Jackie scored a minor hit with a song called Any Other Way in 1962 and this was the B-side of its follow-up, In My Tenement, in 1963.

Her stagecraft was compared with Little Richard and James Brown, and she could probably have found fame had she not turned down an offer to sing on the Ed Sullivan Show when they insisted she present as male.

Later, after moving back to Los Angeles on the early ’70s, she turned down an offer to join George Clinton’s band Funkadelic in order to care for her mother, after whose death in 1996 she returned to Nashville, where she died in 2019.

A radio documentary about her revived interest in her music and in 2017, a collection of essays chronicling Toronto’s LGBTQ history was published under the title Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer, including an essay devoted to Shane.