Wanda Lavonne Jackson was, simply and without contest, the greatest menstruating rock ’n’ roll singer whom the world has ever known. Born in Maud, Oklahoma, on October 20, 1937, the cherished daughter of Tom and Nellie Jackson, she was a prodigious child in more ways than one. At the age of nine, she had been encouraged to play the piano by her father, an indigent laborer who had himself, in days of greater leisure, passed his hands with some degree of unpolished skill across the keys of that instrument. Soon after, of her own will, she turned to the guitar. As her mother was quoted as saying (in an article in the May 1966 issue of Hoedown, one of the outstanding illiterate periodicals of an outstandingly illiterate day), “Wanda wasn’t like other children after the guitar came into her life.”

Not like other children, indeed. At the age of 13, a year after her family moved to Oklahoma City, where her father had landed a job as a used-car salesman, Wanda already had her own nylon stockings, brassieres, and daily radio show, the latter broadcast by KLPR, a station two blocks from Capitol Hill High School, where she attended classes with her legs crossed.