Reviews > CDs

Wanda Jackson: Unfinished Business

Sugar Hill

Working with Jack White last year was a brilliant move on Wanda Jackson’s part. It put her in front of her largest—and youngest—audience in years, and once she was there, the septuagenarian proved that she’s still got that rockabilly fire. But where White submerged her in his own surreal and sharply stylized world, singer/songwriter and budding producer Justin Townes Earle fashioned Unfinished Business to fit her sensibilities like a glove. Jackson’s never needed much to throw a party, and the down-to-earth band that Earle assembled behind her jumps, swings and sways with the grace of players serving the singer and the song. Jackson teases, taunts and tells off bad-news guys during the album’s many youthful numbers, but she shows an entirely different side of her interpretive gifts during her steel-laced honky-tonk duet with the generations-younger Earle, “Am I Even a Memory?” For a firecracker, she’s got phenomenal emotional range.