The Uncensored Nature of Millie Jackson

She never achieved a reputation in some countries on par with her popularity among American and British audiences, but Millie Jackson deserves far better than her status as a cult artist.

Born in Thomson, Georgia, Mildred Virginia Jackson moved to New York as a teenager and launched a modeling career that landed her in magazines aimed at African American readers, all while she began performing in local clubs. After a false start with a single on MGM, her recording career truly began on Spring with a first 45, “A Child of God,” a modest R&B hit in 1971. Recorded at the famous Muscle Shoals studios, her subsequent records—including the hit “It Hurts So Good,” pulled from the soundtrack to the blaxploitation film Cleopatra Jones—earned her a place in the ranks of great Southern soul voices, alongside Candi Staton and Denise LaSalle.

Her career shifted into another dimension starting in 1974 with the album Caught Up, produced by Brad Shapiro. The musical content, still cut with the Muscle Shoals heavyweights, remained unchanged, but the entire record was structured to tell a story—that of a love affair between a woman and a married man. The first side, built around an extended version of the classic “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right,” broken up by a long monologue, presents the mistress’s point of view; the second gives voice to the betrayed wife, both embodied by Jackson, whose impassioned singing serves as the through-line. In narrative terms, the result lands closer to soap opera than Shakespearean tragedy, but the idea was new and the execution flawless. Success came immediately, on both the pop and R&B charts, and a second volume, Still Caught Up, was set in motion, with material largely co-written by Jackson, now credited as co-producer alongside Shapiro.

The conceptual dimension receded on subsequent records, but Jackson established herself as the voice of a Women’s Lib movement that stopped at neither the kitchen door nor the bedroom door, all of it carried by the impeccable groove of the Muscle Shoals crew, whom even the disco turn didn’t faze. The peak of this period came in 1979 with a live album, Live and Uncensored, whose rawness alarmed the more conservative segment of the African American public, still Jackson’s core audience. As late as the 2000s, a festival organizer might walk up to the singer and ask her to skip performing her none-too-subtle “Phuck U Symphony.”

With the closure of Spring and her signing to Jive, the 1980s proved less favorable for Jackson, who seemed to waver between chasing the pop respectability of a Tina Turner (Act of War, a duet with Elton John) and cultivating her status as a forerunner to hip-hop’s bad bitches. A handful of singles brought her back to the upper reaches of the R&B chart, but this era is most memorable for the gleefully tasteless cover art of Back to the S**t!. Now operating outside mainstream commercial circuits, she toured in the 1990s with a musical, Young Man, Older Woman, and became a recurring headliner on the lucrative nostalgia circuit, primarily for Southern African American audiences. A final self-produced album, Not for Church Folk!, came out in 2001.

Extremely rare on European stages—she appears to have performed in France only once, at Le Palace in 1978—she made a notable appearance at the legendary Porretta Soul Festival in 2004, delivering two nights with her band that left witnesses in awe. Now largely out of the public eye, she benefits from the loyal support of British reissue label Ace, which keeps her principal Spring albums in steady circulation, allowing new fans to dive deep into a body of work with very few equivalents.