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This article is part of <\/em>Overlooked<\/em><\/a>, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.<\/em><\/p>\n When Cordell Jackson\u2019s long and mostly obscure musical career intersected briefly with American pop culture in the early 1990s (coinciding with her appearance in a popular beer commercial<\/a>, in which she showed the guitarist Brian Setzer a few tricks), it was almost as if she had stepped out of a dream: grandma, resplendent in a shiny ball gown and bouffant, peering through her old-lady glasses while ferociously rocking out on a cherry red electric guitar, amp cranked up to 10.<\/p>\n Even if we had never seen or heard Jackson before, she seemed to reside in the dusty bric-a-brac of our country\u2019s collective unconscious: one of rock \u2019n\u2019 roll\u2019s forgotten pioneers, Cordell Jackson had been making music for more than half a century.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Cordell Miller was born on July 15, 1923, to William and Stella Miller in Pontotoc, Miss., a small city once known as a hide-out for Jesse James\u2019s gang of outlaws in the 19th century. She took an early interest in music-making, learning to play banjo, piano, upright bass and harmonica.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By age 12, she was sitting in with her father\u2019s string band, the Pontotoc Ridge Runners. \u201cWhen I picked up the guitar, I could see it in their eyes: \u2018Little girls don\u2019t play guitar,\u2019\u201d she later recalled<\/a>. \u201cI looked right at \u2019em and said, \u2018I<\/em> do.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Jackson always claimed that she had been rocking out well before the men who would make rock \u2018n\u2019 roll famous. \u201cIf what I\u2019m doing now is rock \u2018n\u2019 roll or rockabilly or whatever,\u201d she told the newspaper The Tulsa World in 1992, \u201cthen I was doing it when Elvis was a 1-year-old. That\u2019s just a fact.\u201d<\/p>\n Or, as she told Cornfed magazine: \u201cWhatever song it was, I always creamed it, so to speak. I play fast. I have always gyrated it up.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1943, she married William Jackson, moved to Memphis and began trying to scratch her way into the male-dominated music scene. She eventually befriended and recorded demos with the producer Sam Phillips<\/a>, who would go on to start Sun Records. But she grew impatient with Phillips, who saw her gender as an obstacle, and created Moon Records, becoming<\/a> one of the first women in America to record and produce their own music (some say the<\/em> first) and securing her place in history.<\/p>\n \u201cCordell was immune to being told \u2018no.\u2019 It was almost like that was her art,\u201d the country singer and songwriter Laura Cantrell said by phone. \u201cA lot of artists are told \u2018no\u2019 \u2014 that what we want to do is not possible, but Cordell was absolutely determined to be an artist. That was not typical for a woman, especially in the South.\u201d<\/p>\n Recording sessions for Moon Records were held in Jackson\u2019s living room, where she engineered, produced and released music by regional artists like Allen Page, Earl Patterson and Johnny Tate. Though Jackson initially hewed mostly to the production end of things, she also released some of her own performances, including 1958\u2019s \u201cRock and Roll Christmas\u201d and \u201cBeboppers\u2019 Christmas.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But neither she nor her roster of artists hit the big time, and the 1960s and \u201970s saw Jackson moving through a peripatetic series of other kinds of work: at a printing company; as an interior decorator with a real estate agency; as a D.J. on the all-female Memphis station WHER; running a junk shop. It wasn\u2019t until the early 1980s, when she happened to cross paths with the musician, performance artist and filmmaker Tav Falco, that things really changed for her.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The two first met at a Western Sizzlin steakhouse in Memphis, at a benefit for Don Ezell, the longtime gofer at Sun Records. \u201cEvery guitar player in Memphis was there,\u201d Falco said in a video interview. That included Jackson, who approached him after hearing his band, the Panther Burns (featuring Alex Chilton<\/a>), cover one of her originals, \u201cDateless Night.\u201d The two became fast friends. He invited her to appear on bills with him and his band, and she accepted, despite the fact that, at almost 60, she had yet to play her first professional live gig.<\/p>\n This marked the beginning of the startling second act of Jackson\u2019s musical career, as she became \u2014 among a certain set \u2014 an elder stateswoman of grungy thrash guitar. During a 1988 appearance on the WFMU radio show \u201cThe Hound,\u201d Jackson plugged in her guitar and let it rip; the result<\/a> sounds less like a performance than a wild animal turned loose in the studio. In an interview, Jim Marshall, the show\u2019s host, described Jackson\u2019s playing as \u201csome of the most vicious, nasty rock \u2019n\u2019 roll guitar I\u2019ve ever heard in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She headlined at colorful, now-vanished rock clubs in New York City, like CBGB, the Lone Star and the Lakeside Lounge, as well as at Maxwell\u2019s, in Hoboken, N.J. She mostly played solo, but occasionally local musicians backed her up<\/a>, including the Brooklyn band the A-Bones. \u201cThere were no rehearsals,\u201d Miriam Linna, the band\u2019s drummer, recalled in an interview. \u201cIt was just, \u2018Let\u2019s go!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Susan M. Clarke, editor and publisher of Cornfed magazine, added: \u201cI can\u2019t imagine anyone knew what to do with her. I\u2019m surprised they didn\u2019t have her committed.\u201d<\/p>\n Offstage, Jackson was down to earth but proper, and deeply religious. She did not curse, and she did not drink \u201canything but milk or water,\u201d she told<\/a> Roctober magazine in 1993. Falco recalled her saying that doctors had put her on \u201can all-meat diet,\u201d and Kenn Goodman \u2014 whose Pravda Records released her album \u201cLive in Chicago<\/a>\u201d in 1997 \u2014 said in an interview that whenever Jackson traveled (always in her yellow Cadillac; she disliked planes), it was with \u201cher own steak, her own milk, and giant jugs of tap water from Memphis,\u201d because she didn\u2019t trust any other kind.<\/p>\n Nancy Apple, a close friend and acolyte, said that when Jackson went grocery shopping, \u201cshe would wear white old-lady gloves \u2014 not for fashion; she\u2019d just always say, \u2018I don\u2019t want to touch all that money<\/em>!\u2019\u201d When she got home, Jackson would take any bills she had received as change, wash them in the sink and hang them from clothespins to dry.<\/p>\n Eccentricities aside, it was what Jackson did onstage that was truly astonishing. Watching archival footage of her performances is a jolting experience. Speaking from the stage at a 1995 concert in Memphis, Jackson described her music as \u201canywhere from a barnyard disaster to classical.\u201d<\/p>\n There was an unbridled ferocity to Jackson\u2019s playing, almost as though she were fighting with her guitar to give her what she wanted. Her compositions \u2014 most of them instrumentals \u2014 may not be terribly unusual, but what she did with them, in her urgent, raw and unapologetically abrasive way, was. Jackson didn\u2019t just break guitar strings when she played. She broke picks.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Intonation didn\u2019t seem to matter a whit to her. Neither did keeping time: In one interview<\/a>, she said, \u201cI\u2019ve found that the faster I play, the more accurate I become.\u201d Form and melody, too, seemed mostly beside the point. Instead, it was all attitude, attack, rhythm, speed and noise.<\/p>\n She \u201cwas comfortable in her own skin,\u201d said the bassist Marcus Natale of the A-Bones \u2014 she didn\u2019t put on airs, made no concessions, and seems to have never been anything less (or more) than exactly who she was, her performances a testament to the exhilarating power of ragged, unmanicured music.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not a masterpiece,\u201d she wrote on the sleeve of one of her records, \u201cbut it could be so bad you\u2019ll like it.\u201d<\/p>\n Jackson died of pancreatic cancer on Oct. 14, 2004, in Memphis. She was 81.<\/p>\n In her music, and in everything she set her mind to, Jackson was nothing if not determined. \u201cI\u2019ve never been confused about what I was supposed to do while I was down here,\u201d she said in 1999. \u201cIf I think of it, I do it.\u201d<\/p>\n Howard Fishman is a musician and composer and the author of \u201cTo Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n