Cordell Jackson

Who was Cordell Jackson?

Cordell Jackson 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 Pontotoc, Mississippi, 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.