Hers is the most unconventional of success stories, but Jackie Shane wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Once nearly lost to obscurity, Shane’s important contributions to soul music and LGBTQ heritage will finally be officially recognized with a historical marker in her hometown of Nashville on Friday evening. The memorial is especially significant for its setting in the capital of Tennessee, where trans rights have recently been targeted.
“To my knowledge, it’s the first official trans marker in the state of Tennessee,” said Sarah Calise, founder of Nashville Queer History, who along with Shane’s family championed the marker with the city’s Metropolitan Historical Commission and chose its site along Jefferson Street in North Nashville, the historic hub of the city’s Black community.
The marker’s dedication will feature performances by a host of Nashville-based LGBTQ performers like singer Crys Matthews and speeches from local dignitaries including Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell and Tennessee’s first trans lawmaker, Olivia Hill.
“I think this is really important, because there’s this common misconception that transgender identity is recent, that it’s something of the 21st century,” Calise told NBC News. “When we take a look at history and at people like Jackie Shane, we realize this is an identity and a gender diversity that’s existed for decades — and if we look even further, we could say centuries. But here in Nashville, we can point to someone born in 1940 who felt this way about their gender identity.”
By any measure, Shane’s bold life and circuitous path to fame were anything but typical.
A gifted young Nashville soul singer who saw too few opportunities for herself as a Black trans performer in the Jim Crow South of the late 1950s, Shane joined a traveling carnival.
Jefferson Street in North Nashville on March 19.Seth Herald / AFP via Getty Images file
Along the road she fell in love with Canada, where she settled in Toronto and forged a successful nightclub and recording career in the ‘60s. Shane thrilled audiences with her infectious and gender-straddling performances that blended the energy of rock and roll with the soul of rhythm and blues. She even hit No. 2 on the Canadian pop music chart in 1963 with her rendition of William Bell’s “Any Other Way.”
Then, after moving to Los Angeles in the early ‘70s, Shane disappeared into utter obscurity, whispered by some to have been a victim of murder.
Flash forward to the 2010s, when a series of Canadian music connoisseurs rediscovered Shane and resurrected her career in absentia.
Just as her seminal ‘60s recordings were being rereleased to new ears and wide acclaim, Shane was found alive and well — if by then completely withdrawn from society — living in the same North Nashville neighborhood where she’d grown up and honed her performing chops.
In 2018, she was nominated for a Grammy, spawning plans for her first new music in decades and a triumphant return to the stage.
Then tragically in February 2019, less than two weeks after she lost the Grammy, Shane, 78, died in the Nashville home where she had been self-cloistered since the death of her beloved and supportive mother a quarter-century earlier.
“Jackie said once her mother died, that just took all of that performance thing out of her, and she didn’t want to see another stage,” explained Shane’s friend Lorenzo Washington, founder and curator of the Jefferson Street Sound Museum in North Nashville.
Washington was one of very few people whom the reclusive Shane allowed into her life in her later years.
“She did want to get back into performing again right at the end, especially after she got the Grammy nomination,” he said. “She knew I had a recording studio here, so she was writing a song for us to record.”
Shane had also agreed to appear in the documentary “Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story,” directed by Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee and executive produced by fellow Canadian Elliot Page.
“I just couldn’t believe that this extraordinary music had been made in my hometown of Toronto by a Black trans woman in the 1960s, and I hadn’t heard it before,” Mabbott said of his first encounter with Shane’s recordings. “I needed to know more about this incredible artist, and I needed to understand more about how her history could’ve been all but erased.”
The moving documentary, which has earned awards and critical praise along the film festival circuit this year, makes use of the extensive phone conversations Shane and Mabbott shared over the course of several months, with an actress and animation used to depict Shane on screen.
Jackie Shane in Toronto in 1967.Jeff Goode / Toronto Star via Getty Images file
“The idea [for the film] was that we’d come down [to Nashville] with a crew to interview her, but tragically she passed away a month later,” Mabbott said. “If not for those phone recordings we wouldn’t have been able to have her tell her story in her own words.”
Not lost on the filmmakers was the fact that Shane’s phoenix-like second round of fame was happening during a precarious period for transgender people around the world and in particular Tennessee, where a conservative state Legislature has passed a steady stream of laws targeting the trans community.
“It didn’t change how we told the story — our guide and North Star for that was always Jackie herself, her voice and her words,” Mabbott said. “But it certainly added to the urgency everyone involved, including our executive producer, Elliot Page, and his company, PageBoy Productions, had to bringing her voice to life and amplifying it and doing everything we can to get her story out in the world.”
Mabbott said he believes Shane chose to finally tell her story not because she thought the world was ready to hear it, but because the world needed to hear it.
“She was so concerned for young performers and for young LGBTQ+ kids because of the danger and discrimination that exists in the world today,” he said. “She felt her story was needed to bring courage and joy to those communities, and to show a trans woman whose life was led with courage and truth and passion and joy.”
Scheduled to coincide with the inauguration of Shane’s historical marker, “Any Other Way” will have its Nashville screen debut at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on Saturday. Shane has also been featured in the city for the last several months as part of “Night Train to Nashville: Music City Rhythm & Blues Revisited,” a remounting of the museum’s groundbreaking 2004-05 exhibition honoring Nashville’s vibrant R&B legacy.
Artifacts at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in 2023 in Nashville.Jason Kempin / Getty Images for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
“The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum has a responsibility to educate people about how Nashville became known across the world as ‘Music City,’” Vice President of Museum Services Michael Gray said.
“Black music flourished here before the city became known as the capital of country music,” he explained. “So we’re honored that the Nashville premiere of the film will take place at the museum, giving us a chance to share Jackie’s important story, a life that includes bravery, mystique, discovery, talent and more.”
Calise said she believes Shane can also stand as a vital icon for young LGBTQ people well beyond Nashville.
“It’s so important for trans, nonbinary and other queer folks to be able to look to ancestors and elders who survived in a time of even greater oppression than we’re feeling now and found ways to build community,” she said.
“I think one of the great things about history,” she added, “is it can empower you to see that you are one person in a long line of LGBTQ people who have been trying to live authentically and fighting for the rights of their community for decades.”
The simple freedom to live authentically, Washington recalled, was Shane’s constant wish for herself and everyone. “That was her thing: ‘I just want to live and let live,’” he said.
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