Pioneering Black Transgender Singer Jackie Shane Finally Gets Her Rightful Place in Tennessee

Her success story is the most unconventional of them all, but Jackie Shane wouldn’t want it any other way.

Once nearly forgotten, Shane’s important contributions to soul music and LGBTQ heritage will finally be officially recognized with a historic marker in her hometown of Nashville on Friday night. The monument is especially significant given its location in Tennessee’s capital, where transgender rights have recently come under attack.

“To my knowledge, this is the first official transgender memorial in the state of Tennessee,” said Sarah Calise, founder of Nashville Queer History, who, along with Shane’s family, campaigned for the memorial to be built at the city’s Metropolitan Historical Commission and selected its location on Jefferson Street in North Nashville, the historic center of the city’s black community.

The unveiling ceremony will feature performances by a number of Nashville LGBTQ artists, including singer Crys Matthews, and speeches from local dignitaries, including Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell and Tennessee’s first openly transgender state legislator, Olivia Hill.

“I think it’s really important because there’s a common misconception that transgender identity is something new, something from the 21st century,” Calise told NBC News. “When you look at history and people like Jackie Shane, you realize that this is a gender identity and diversity that has existed for decades — and if you look back even further, you could say centuries. But here in Nashville, we can point to someone born in 1940 who felt that way about their gender identity.”

By no means can we conclude that Shane’s courageous life and winding path to fame were typical.

Shane, a talented young soul singer from Nashville who saw few opportunities for herself as a black transgender artist during the segregated South of the late 1950s, joined a traveling carnival.

Along the way, she fell in love with Canada, settling in Toronto and making a career in the 1960s in nightclubs and recording. Shane thrilled audiences with her infectious, interwoven performances that combined the energy of rock and roll with the soul of rhythm and blues. In 1963, she even reached No. 2 on the Canadian pop charts with her rendition of William Bell’s “Any Other Way.”

Then, in the early 70s, after moving to Los Angeles, Shane fell into complete obscurity. Some said he was the victim of murder.

Let’s go back to the 2010s, when Canadian music experts rediscovered Shane and resurrected her career. in absentia.

By the time her groundbreaking 1960s recordings were reissued to wide acclaim, Shane was found safe and sound (though by then completely withdrawn from society) in the same North Nashville neighborhood where she had grown up and honed her stage skills.

In 2018, she was nominated for a Grammy Award, which initiated plans for her first new music in decades and a triumphant return to the stage.

Tragically, in February 2019, less than two weeks after losing her Grammy, Shane, at the age of 78, died in the Nashville home where she had been isolated since the death of her beloved and supportive mother a quarter of a century earlier.

“Jackie said that after her mother died, she lost her desire to perform and didn’t want to be on stage anymore,” explained Shane’s friend Lorenzo Washington, founder and curator of the Jefferson Street Sound Museum in North Nashville.

Washington was one of the few people the reclusive Shane allowed into her life in later years.

“She really wanted to get back into performing right at the end, especially after she got nominated for a Grammy,” he said. “She knew I had a recording studio here, so she was writing a song for us to record.”

Shane has also agreed to appear in the documentary “Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story,” directed by Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee and produced by fellow Canadian Elliot Page.

“I just couldn’t believe that this extraordinary music was being created in my hometown of Toronto in the ’60s by a black transgender woman, and I hadn’t heard it before,” Mabbott said of his first encounter with Shane’s recordings. “I had to learn more about this incredible artist, and I had to better understand how her story could have been almost completely erased.”

The moving documentary, which won awards and critical acclaim at film festivals this year, draws on extensive telephone conversations between Shane and Mabbott over several months, as well as the acting and animation that portrayed Shane on screen.

“The idea (for the film) was that we would come (to Nashville) with a crew to interview her, but unfortunately she died a month later,” Mabbott said. “If it weren’t for those phone recordings, we wouldn’t have been able to let her tell her story in her own words.”

It didn’t escape the filmmaker’s attention that Shane’s second round of fame came at a volatile time for transgender people around the world, and particularly in Tennessee, where the conservative state legislature had passed a series of laws targeting the transgender community.

“That hasn’t changed” How we told the story — our guide and our North Star was always Jackie herself, her voice and her words,” Mabbott said. “But it certainly increased the urgency that everyone involved, including our executive producer, Elliot Page, and his company, PageBoy Productions, had to have to bring her voice to life, amplify it, and do everything we could to bring her story to light.”

Mabbott said he believes Shane decided 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 very concerned about young performers and 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 these communities and to show a trans woman whose life was lived with courage, truth, passion and joy.”

Scheduled to coincide with the inauguration of Shane’s historic memorial, “Any Other Way” will make its Nashville screen debut at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on Saturday. Shane has also been in the city for the past few months as part of “Night Train to Nashville: Music City Rhythm & Blues Revisited,” a revival of the museum’s groundbreaking 2004-05 exhibit honoring Nashville’s vibrant R&B heritage.

“It is the duty of the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum to educate people about how Nashville gained worldwide fame as ‘Music City,’” said Michael Gray, vice president of museum services.

“Black music flourished here before the city became known as the capital of country music,” he explained. “That’s why we’re honored to have the film premiere in Nashville at the museum, giving us a chance to share Jackie’s important story, a life that encompasses courage, mystery, discovery, talent and so much more.”

Calise said she believes Shane has the potential to become an important icon for LGBTQ youth outside of Nashville, too.

“It’s incredibly important for transgender, nonbinary, and other queer people to be able to turn to ancestors and elders who have endured times of even greater oppression than what we’re experiencing now and have found ways to build community,” she said.

“I think one of the best things about history,” she added, “is that 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 have been fighting for the rights of their community for decades.”

The simple freedom of living 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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