“Ask Me What You Want”:
“My career has been a fluke, really”, Millie Jackson told The Philadelphia Enquirer in 2001. “I started singing because somebody dared me to.” That famous dare occurred one evening in 1964 at a Harlem club- either Small’s Paradise or the Palms Cafe. Accounts differ. One thing that is not disputed, though, is the impression Jackson made as she nervously took the stage and then destroyed Ben E. King’s “Don’t Play That Song”. The audience responded with a furor, and, just like that, a star was born.
Jackson spent her earliest days on a farm near Thompson, GA. Her mother died when she was just two years old, leaving her only child to be raised by her father, Jubilee, who ran a local juke joint. Presumably it was here that Jackson first became acquainted with the raunch and ruckus that would later make her a controversial star. Things continued apace for several years until Jubilee, seeking greener pastures, decamped for Newark, NJ, leaving Millie under the care of her very strict grandparents.
This arrangement lasted for eighteen months until Millie, now fourteen and longing terribly for the unfettered life she knew with Jubilee, lit out for Newark to find him. Ms. Jackson, so frank on stage and record, has historically revealed little about her personal life. So we’re left to wonder what went wrong between her and Jubilee because two years later Millie, now aged sixteen, moved in with an aunt in Brooklyn.
She worked a series of lousy jobs whilst earning her diploma at night. She then worked as a fashion photographer for Jive and Sepia, and later became an assistant supervisor for Kimberly Knitwear. In 1967 she welcomed her daughter Keisha. In 1971, after nearly ten years hustling the New York club circuit, she signed with Spring Records.
“A Child Of God”:
The first fruit of their partnership, 1972’s Millie Jackson, was an artistic and commercial success. It had been heralded by the 1971 release of “A Child Of God”, (#22 R&B), a searing, merciless portrait of the fundamental weakness of humanity when its subjected to the privations and humiliations of inner-city impoverishment. Jackson snarls and spits the song, daring the listener to stand in judgment of the wretches she describes. Some radio stations refused to play the track, the first in Jackson’s long string of divisive recordings.
Jackson studies a sweeter sentiment on “Ask Me What You Want” (#4 R&B), a charging devotional with a shouted hook. On the pulsating “If This Is Love”, Jackson’s lacerating vocal holds sufficient desperation to sell this song of abandoning a toxic relationship. That same raw, room-filling singing punctures the boudoir melodrama of “Strange Things”, flawlessly embodying a character driven to her wit’s end.
Millie Jackson traffics in all the popular styles of its day: “I Ain’t Giving Up” is a sweaty study in Southern funk, with Jackson declaring her resoluteness over burning backup that builds to a strident, insistent coda. “My Man, A Sweet Man” (#7 R&B) is an uncharacteristically upbeat take on romance from the habitually cynical Millie, complete with a bright, driving Motown rhythm. “Ask Me What You Want”, all chiming guitars and high-gloss, orchestral hooks, evokes the glimmer and gloss of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s Philadelphia pop-soul.
“My Man, A Sweet Man”:
“I Just Can’t Stand It”, one of three Millie Jackson copyrights here, is a sweet, slow ballad, with her tortured vocal soaring and plummeting through a portrait of defeated resignation. Jackson dips into bouncy soul polyphony, reminiscent of Candi Staton in Muscle Shoals, on “I Gotta Get Away (From My Own Self)”.
Millie Jackson was successful enough to secure its namesake a place in history, although it would take another two years before Mille Jackson truly broke through. That came in 1974 with the arrival of Caught Up, an ambitious, character-driven portrayal of a love triangle collapsing in on itself. Caught Up marked the first appearance of the salacious, often obscene “raps” that Jackson would become famous (or at least notorious) for, most notably on the eleven-minute version of “If Loving You Is Wrong I Don’t Want To Be Right”. It was the prototype on which Jackson would base her public persona for the rest of her career: the “nasty” provocateur, unafraid to present the unvarnished truth about the trials of love at or below the poverty line- record executives and the FCC be damned.
Although this abrasive, pugnacious style has its precursor here in “A Child Of God”, Millie Jackson is a much different kind of work- the debut of an artist who’s mastered her approach, but is still searching for her subject. For although it was her long-winded, unflinching depictions of infidelity and raunch that would become her signature, on Millie Jackson, its tenderness and hopefulness which abound.