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Jalylah Burrell is a writer, oral historian, educator, and DJ reared in Seattle and based in Harlem. A scholar of Black popular culture, her research interests include African American literature and history; African diasporic aesthetic and critical practices; popular music; comedy; and film and television history. A PhD candidate in Yale University's departments of American Studies and African American Studies, she is currently completing the manuscript, Capacity for Laughter: Toward a Black Feminist Theory of Humor.

“Spurning the Soul Silo: Millie Jackson’s Freedom Songbook”
“Y’all didn’t think we black folks could sing no mess like this, did you?” quipped Millie Jackson on her 1981 versioning of Hank Williams Jr.'s “If You Don't Like Hank Williams.” Jackson cheekily transposed the Kris Kristofferson-penned defense of country music’s breadth onto her own decade-long career as an ostensible funk and soul stylist. Where Williams Jr., had tipped his hat to country music stalwarts Charlie Daniels and Johnny Cash, Jackson hailed rhythm and bluesmen Otis Redding and Johnny Taylor as her lineage. She titled her riff, “Anybody That Don’t Like Millie Jackson,” and offered the same consequence as the Williams Jr. original, “You Can Kiss Our Ass.”

The song’s irreverence suited Jackson, dubbed “the recording industry's queen of the rap and raunch” by Jet Magazine in 1980. A beloved constant on the black music landscape, Jackson has consistently foregrounded country in her repertoire, plied the bawdy and judiciously employed comic monologues and vocal techniques to convey the complexity of her identity as a black woman, and fully exercise hard-won freedoms including “sovereignty in sexual matters,” a liberatory project Angela Davis highlighted in her landmark study of blues women. But much of Jackson’s output has been dismissed as mess: campy, bawdy, or a misuse of her impeccable Gladys Knight-esque
instrument. She has endured repeated scoldings from the black press and dismissals from the critical establishment.

Drawing upon an extended, unpublished interview I conducted with Jackson at the occasion of her 2015 release, On The Soul Country Side, and close listenings of select records, I will survey how Jackson’s refusal of conventions of genre, song-form, decorum, and tone produced some seriously funny, sexually explicit experiments in black music outside of an invented black women’s sonic ideal. Moreover, I will suggest that by sounding black women’s desires and disparate influences, her discography constitutes a form of freedom songbook.