Wanda Jackson - Tears Will Be the Chaser for Your Wine [8CD Box Set] (1997)

This eight-CD collection contains all of Wanda Jackson's Capitol recordings from 1963 to 1973, including nine Top 30 country hits, The Box It Came In, Because It's You, Tears Will Be The Chaser For The Wine, Both Sides Of The Line, A Girl Don't Have To Drink To Have Fun, My Big Iron Skillet, A Woman Lives For Love, Fancy Satin Pillows and Back Then, plus ten unissued recordings and several songs that only appeared on singles. All of Wanda Jackson's country and rock 'n' roll albums from 1963 to 1973 are here, including the Grammy-nominated 'Two Sides Of..', as well as 'Blues In My Heart', and 'Salutes the Country Music Hall of Fame.' All of Wanda's recordings in German, Dutch, and Japanese are here too, including the hits Santo Domingo and Morgen Ja Morgen. The set is rounded out with photos from Wanda Jackson's personal photo album, and a new biography.

TEARS WILL BE THE CHASER FOR THE WINE

Wanda Jackson sings. That’s what she does. She discovered early that she was meant to sing, and stayed true to her calling. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she’s comfortably off, but when she can’t get out and sing, she has a hard time coping with the mundaneness of everyday life. Back in the Fifties when other women her age were settling into a routine of child rearing, cooking and housework, Wanda was performing, touring overseas, and flying to Los Angeles or Nashville for sessions. Housework holds no allure now. Wanda’s husband, Wendell, jokes that he was eating blackened food years before it became fashionable.

The sweat and determination that Wanda put into her career during the Fifties and Sixties becomes clear in sometimes poignant ways. She breaks out her old Martin D-18 guitar, the one with 'Wanda Jackson' on it. The back has been repaired where her belt buckle and costume jewelry nearly wore it through. The pick guard has been extended to accommodate the beating it took. Like a slave quilt, the old D-18 is almost a piece of folk art that says much about the person who once used it.

Our previous Wanda Jackson boxed set covered her recording career from 1954 to the end of 1962. As it closed, Wanda, Patsy Cline and Kitty Wells were the most successful women in country music. By the time this set opens in June 1963, Patsy Cline was dead. The country music market was minuscule by today’s standards. Album sales rarely topped 10,000; singles did well if they sold 50,000 copies. Today, best-selling country albums regularly top one million copies and recording budgets start at a quarter of a million dollars and peak in the millions. An artist releases an album every year or two. Wanda’s albums were usually cut in three four-song sessions and cost less than two thousand dollars for the pickers, the vocal chorus, and the studio. She was committed to two albums a year.

It was a very different world, but the key--then as now--was breaking out of the country market to tap into pop sales. Patsy Cline managed it, as did Jim Reeves and several others, but the arrival of the Beatles in early 1964 made it harder for country artists to get airplay on pop stations, and country music went into one of its periodic downturns. Then, in the late Sixties, Glen Campbell pioneered an entirely new pop-country fusion. Country songs hadn’t changed very much since Hank Williams died, but Campbell, along with Roger Miller, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and others, began stretching the boundaries, and nearly everyone followed. The instrumentation got fuller, the songs got wordier, and pickers started using chords that Hank wouldn’t have recognised. Wanda--like every other country artist--had to come to terms with these changes.