EVERY NIGHT IS SATURDAY NIGHT: A Country Girl's Journey to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by Wanda Jackson with Scott B. Bomar
Wanda Jackson's debut single, "You Can't Have My Love," reached the Top 10 while she was still a sixteen-year-old high school student. She hit the road after graduation, playing package shows with Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley, who gave Wanda his ring and asked her to be "his girl." With Presley's encouragement, the Oklahoma native began recording rock music, often releasing singles with country on one side and rock on the other during her decade-and-a-half tenure on Capitol Records.
Known for her energetic stage shows and pioneering presence as a female artist, Wanda stormed the charts with a series of hit singles, including "Let's Have a Party," "Right or Wrong," and "In the Middle of a Heartache." With more than 40 albums to her credit, Wanda has proven to be an enduring and genre-defying legend of American music.
In Every Night is Saturday Night, Wanda tells her own story of getting discovered by Country Music Hall of Famer Hank Thompson; shy she refused to return to The Grand Ole Opry for more than fifty years; the challenges she and her integrated band, The Party Timers, faced in the early 1960s; finding the love of her life; her recent work with rock luminaries Jack White and Joan Jett; and how her deep faith has sustained her over more than seven decades of rocking, shocking, and thrilling audiences around the globe.
Known as the queen of rockabilly, Wanda Jackson combined grit with glamour to set a new template for country music's "girl singers" of the 1950s. With urging from Elvis, she soon showed the world that girls could rock, too! Wanda landed more than 30 singles on the country and pop charts between 1954 and 1974. She is a multiple Grammy nominee, a recipient of the Americana Music Association's Lifetime Achievement Award, and a 2009 inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Scott B. Bomar is an award-winning writer who has authored or co-authored several books, including Southbound: An Illustrated History of Southern Rock; The Bakersfield Sound: Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and California Country; and The "Odessey": The Zombies in Words and Images. He earned a Grammy nomination for his liner notes to the rockabilly compilation The Other Side of Bakersfield, and co-hosts the podcast, Songcraft: Conversations with Great Songwriters. Elvis Costello is a Grammy award-winning musician whose career spans almost four decades. His first three albums all appeared on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. A prolific singer-songwriter, Costello has gone on to release a long list of critically-acclaimed albums, and in 2003 was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.