Jackie Shane at the edge of stardom. The documentary Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story opens in select theatres Aug. 16.courtesy of Banger Films and the NFB
- Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story
- Directed by Michael Mabbott, Lucah Rosenberg-Lee
- Starring Jackie Shane, Rob Bowman, Sandra Caldwell
- Classification PG; 98 minutes
- Opens in select theatres Aug. 16
Critic’s Pick
The lost-then-found Toronto R&B singer Jackie Shane recorded a dynamite live album at the city’s Saphire Tavern in 1967. The music was ecstatic; her monologues were fearlessly honest and fascinating. “I’ve got no time for squares,” she told her audience. “Don’t hinder my business.”
It’s a great line, but the fact is, her business was hindered. Shane was a glamorous and exceedingly talented transgender Black woman who gave up her career in order to live her truth. Her triumphant and sad story is told in the stylish, affecting new documentary Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, directed by Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee. Canadian actor Elliot Page is the executive producer.
The film is titled after Shane’s hit single Any Other Way, a regional hit in Toronto in 1963 and a modest success nationally when it was reissued in 1967. She left Toronto for Los Angeles in 1971, disappearing into seclusion and retirement without explanation. Her whereabouts and well-being were subjects of baseless speculation over the years: She had died in a knife fight, she had drowned in an ocean, she had been deported from Canada after a drug bust.
Jackie’s intimate artifacts and belongings on display.Supplied
After Los Angeles, Shane lived in Nashville as a recluse for some time, only emerging from the shadows in 2017, when Chicago-based record label Numero Group released a compilation of her recordings, also titled Any Other Way. She did interviews with major newspapers, including The Globe and Mail.
The interviews in the film weren’t in person – Shane wasn’t ready to give up her privacy. Co-director Mabbott spoke to her by phone weekly over the course of a year. Much of the film is based on recordings of those conversations. She is shown in her home, sitting by a lamp and a table with a rotary dial phone. Those scenes and many others are imagined, re-enacted and artfully animated using rotoscope technology.
Other source material includes a handwritten autobiography discovered posthumously by Nashville relatives who had no idea who Shane was, even though they lived near her. Grammy-winning York University musicologist Rob Bowman, who wrote the liner notes to the Numero Group release, more or less serves as the film’s narrator.
Shane first made her mark in the late 1950s in her hometown of Nashville, Tenn. “You’re amazing,” the American soul-singing star Joe Tex told her. “But you have to leave. Get out of Nashville – get out of the South.”
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Working for a time in a travelling carnival, in 1959 Shane crossed into Canada by train in Cornwall, Ont., where she felt “free.” She made her own way to Montreal, easily finding work in the thriving nightclub scene. She called the city a “crazy place,” where mobsters who controlled the entertainment business briefly kidnapped her in a bid to control her career. She was able to talk her way out of the perilous situation.
By 1961, she was in Toronto, performing at venues such as the Hawk’s Nest, Club Mimicombo, the Zanzibar and the Saphire Tavern to packed houses. The film strongly suggests that Shane’s single Any Other Way was denied the No. 1 spot on the local CHUM Hit Parade because of racism. And, yet, also in the film a newspaper clipping from April 1, 1963, shows Any Other Way at No. 2, trailing only chart-topper He’s So Fine, by the Chiffons, a Black girl-group from New York.
Shane turned down a spot on The Ed Sullivan Show because she was told to appear without makeup, and she refused to perform on American Bandstand because Black kids were discriminated against on the show. She also didn’t tour. As Bowman explains, “She chose not to do the things that you have to become a big star.”
Jackie dared to be intentionally visible as a woman at a time when voices like hers were silenced.Courtesy NFB & Banger Films/Supplied
The film explains her retirement and move to California: She wanted to live as man and wife with her lover, Dan Matlack. She chose an alias, Margaret Anne Daley. “This is a housewife’s name,” said Sandra Caldwell, a trans woman actress and singer.
I would have liked to hear more details on Matlack, but none are offered. A discussion on why the pair broke up is pure conjecture.
Before she died in 2019, Shane was contemplating a string of comeback concerts in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. Denied a second act, Shane is recognized with a heartfelt film that celebrates an undersung icon who lived her authentic self, sparkled on her own terms and defied the squares.