Respected LadyLand - Jessie Mae Robinson: Genre-Busting Songwriter

Today she is probably best known as the woman who wrote Wanda Jackson's signature song "Let's Have a Party" and Louis Jordan's classic "Blue Light Boogie".  But there's something quite exceptional about the career of Jessie Mae Robinson. 

As a "lady songwriter" of the late 1940s and the 1950s, Jessie Mae Robinson was an anomaly in just about every way: She had multiple artists chart hits AT THE SAME TIME with the same song written by her.  Not only that, this happened with multiple Jessie Mae Robinson songs. Even more interesting, many of her songs were recorded in varying genre styles, all released at roughly the same time.

This would've been a remarkable feat by any woman songwriter in the misogynistic mid century record industry, but Jessie Mae Robinson was a Black woman who managed to bust beyond the racialized musical categories established by the rigid record industry.  She was a musical renegade who earned the embrace of the music machine by shrewd salesmanship. 

Listen to this episode of the Respected LadyLand Radio Project to hear a sampling of her songbook.