Mojo - The Music Magazine

HIS DEBUT ALBUM album was a touchstone for '60s British folk, but the life of cult American troubadour Jackson C. Frank was one book-ended by great tragedy. Horribly scarred in a school fire at the age of 11, he was tormented by depression and madness in later years.

To coincide with MOJO 186's feature on this lost legend of music Andrew Male spoke to Katherine Wright (née Henry), the woman he caught a boat to England with, who was there when he wrote his landmark classic Blues Run The Game, and who saw how his money, her pregnancy and his crumbling mind changed everything.

How did you first meet Jackson?
Such a strange story. It was very close to Christmas in December 1963. I'm an only child and my parents fought like cat and dog and should have separated long before they did. They never did as a matter of fact. It was one of those occasions when my mother was spending the holidays with relatives in Niagara Falls, which was 30 miles or something away from Buffalo, where we lived. I was gonna stay home and spend the holidays with my dad. We had a fight and I flounced out the door and decided to take a bus to where my mother was. The bus station in Buffalo was close to a few coffee houses and I was early so I though I'd stop in and see if anyone was there. There wasn't much going on. Just one other person. It was Jackson. I don't remember ever meeting him before then. The two of us being thrust together on what I think was Christmas Eve was unusual enough, and we sat around and talked for a while.

What were your first impressions of him? What made you feel you could talk to this guy?
He was very charming. He had a way of encompassing me in a sort of a big warm hug and at the same time he had a sense of his own authority and superiority. I was a very different person as an 18-year-old freshman to the person I am now and he would have been two and a half years older than me. He kinda had an authority and a sense of being older, probably from what he'd been through. He felt somewhat apart from the normal. I'm sure he wanted to seem worldly and intelligent. He'd been to school and left. It's not clear if he quit or was asked to leave. He was working as a copy boy at The Buffalo News

What look was he rocking?
Button-down shirt, sweater over the top. Even before he got terribly heavy he was an incredible clotheshorse, a little better dressed than a lot of people who'd be sitting round a coffee house on their own at Christmas Eve. It was extremely unlikely that either of us would have been in the coffee house without being drunk or high or destitute. The world was a different place back then.

The long and the short of it was that he offered to drive me to Niagara Falls if I would hang about with him for a little bit longer because after a while I'd looked at my watch and said, 'I gotta go, got a bus to catch.' At some absurd hour for an 18-year-old, I wound up in front of my aunt's house in Niagara Falls, and I'm sure I gave him my phone number and we had a number of orthodox kinda dates. I remember the whole relationship centring around the fact that he was a singer and a performer and I was his girlfriend.

Did he tell you straight after that he was a singer?
He must have done. I don't remember seeing him perform before. There were a couple of coffee houses, the Limelight and the Boar's Head. It seems to me we were in the Boar's Head, and I remember at some point in our relationship Jackson playing for a week at a time there. But he must have said right off the bat that he performed. Especially in that setting - it was dark and it wasn't easy to see what his disabilities were - he was perfectly at ease, perfectly charming, as he often was anyway. So, I was smitten right away. Especially with his generosity of just saying, 'I'll drop everything.' Of course it never occurred to me that anything untoward would occur and nothing did. It was just a different time.

I have to say that I think he probably didn't have a chance of escaping the effects of the fire he was in. If I had to put a name to what I think was the problem, I'd say he was manic-depressive. He certainly had more than one personality. The one I saw at first was charming and adorable and funny in that kinda Irish way you have to say with quotes around it. He had an "Irish" sense of humour and a very deep laugh and enormous appreciation of irony and anything funny. He had a twinkle in his eye.

When you saw him for the first time on stage did that add to his character? Was he one of those people who came alive on stage? Or was he shy?
He was not shy at all. I never saw a moment of it. If anything I think there was an incredible release. He had a beautiful voice. He was an amazing guitarist as well, especially given the problems he had with his hands. I see him to this day throwing his head back and singing his heart out.

That voice was there from the start, the first time you saw him?
Absolutely. Given the fact that he was in that fire and there wasn't smoke damage is astonishing. His face probably survived unlike many other parts of his body. I suppose it could be the case that he just didn't suffer the smoke inhalation. Of course he smoked cigarettes, everybody did in those days. He hadn't managed to inflict a lot of damage to his voice. And it was probably some time before I saw the darker side to him, the moodiness.

How did that manifest itself?
It's easy at this point to say that the money he came into was a door that he stepped through and he was a different person on one side than the other. He got the settlement from a lawsuit that his mother and other parents had instigated to recompense for the fire. He came into the money, I think $80,000, and he came into it on his birthday, 2nd March 1964.

I'd known him for four months before he'd had the money - we'd spent every day together - and I would say the paranoia, although that's probably the wrong word, the sense that people were taking advantage of him, started then. We were sitting in a coffee house, he was talking to someone else, and I didn't even hear his conversation. He came storming over to my table and said, 'You're only taking advantage of me in this relationship! You heard me talking about the money I'm coming into.'

That was my first indication, not only that he had that kind of temper, but that it was absolutely tied up with the fact that he was gonna be pretty rich. I'm sure I denied it and there was eye-rolling and arm-crossing and toe-tapping. I somehow talked him down from it. That was the arc of that kind of behaviour all the time - he would explode and had to be cajoled back into another frame of mind.

What was behind Jackson's decision to go to England?
The accepted Wikipedia version of events was that it was Jackson's idea to go to England and buy cars and guitars. The fact of it is that when he went to England it was because I had finally left him after two years of this extremely difficult relationship.

Weren't you both travelling to England?
Absolutely. I decided that the way I was gonna leave Jackson was not to even talk about it. I'd been through arguments with him before and I knew how I could be swayed by him. So I went to a travel agent on Main Street in Buffalo, New York in the middle of the winter and said, I want to go to England. I'd decided to go to England because I was reading Ian Fleming. Why I didn't go to the Caribbean I don't know! This dear woman, the travel agent, said the Queen Elizabeth is sailing from New York and you can get a ticket for $212. So that's what I did. I sold everything I owned and bought a ticket. With the ticket in hand I confronted Jackson and told him I wasn't happy with the relationship and I was going to England. By the next day he was going to England too. I remember being so calm, I wasn't going to shout or scream...

What was behind that gesture?
I thought, Oh my God! If only I'd put my foot down a year and a half ago in this relationship it could have gone completely differently. He was one of those people who seemed to be completely intractable until someone else issued an ultimatum and then all of a sudden he was like, Oh what a fool I've been, I can't live without you! That was seductive at the time.

So I was heading for England - foolishly, as I found out, with no more than $100 in my pocket. I had a passport but I had no idea what requirements there were to get into the UK at the time. As a courtesy of the people who were travelling from New York to Southampton, you got to go through customs in the middle of the North Atlantic. So I knew by the time the boat got to Cherbourg that I had two choices. The UK would not let me into the country with the money I had. They offered either to let me off at Cherbourg or send me home and bill my parents. I couldn't have that.

According to my passport I spent six days there before I took the ferry over to Southampton and met Jackson. But he'd had difficulty accessing his inheritance money, and because we weren't married the customs officials still didn't believe I could pay my way. They wouldn't stamp my passport and it looked like I'd have to go back. Meanwhile, Jackson had taken a room at the Strand Palace. The cool place to stay was the Savoy over the road, where Dylan and Baez were. Buffy Saint Marie was there and I was mistaken for her as I was half Mohawk and half Irish and we were the only two Indian-Americans in all the UK.

How long did you stay in England?
Until the 2nd of June. We had arrived in February. I was there for just four months.

Click for Part 2 of Katherine Wright's memories of Jackson C. Frank.