Cordell Jackson

Cordell Jackson
Cordell Jackson in about 1990
Background information
Genres	Rock Country music Garage Rock Rockabilly
Instruments	Guitar
Associated acts	The A-Bones

Cordell Jackson (July 15, 1923 – October 14, 2004) was an American guitarist thought to be the first woman to produce, engineer, arrange and promote music on her own rock and roll music label. She was born in , on July 15, 1923, and died in Memphis, Tennessee, on October 14, 2004.

Jackson founded the Moon Records label in Memphis in 1956 after a few years of recording demos at Sam Phillips' Memphis Recording Service and Sun Records Studio. Unable to break into the Sun Records label's stable of male artists, she received the advice and assistance of RCA Records' Chet Atkins in forming this new label to release her music. She began releasing and promoting on the label singles she recorded in her home studio, serving as engineer, producer and arranger. The artists recorded included her and a small family of early rock and roll, rockabilly, and country music performers she recruited from several Southern states.

Tav Falco's Panther Burns and Alex Chilton helped create new interest in her career in the 1980s when they began covering some of her Moon label's old singles such as "Dateless Night", a song she originally wrote in the 1950s for Florida artist Allen Page. Jackson then began playing occasional shows in the 1980s with her signature red Hagstrom electric guitar as a solo artist in Memphis, Hoboken, New York, and Chicago nightclubs. She recorded new material on her label with Memphis musicians Colonel Robert Morris and Bob Holden, becoming known as a "rock-and-roll granny" solo guitar instrumentalist. She appeared in 1991 and 1992 on national talk shows like Late Night with David Letterman and in a television commercial duelling with rockabilly artist Brian Setzer on guitar.