Comin’ Down. Jackie Shane. 1963. Sue.

When Donald Trump announced, “There are only two genders,” on the occasion of his second inauguration into the Office of the US Presidency, he was only validating a long held bias in this country against nonconformists, championing a form of bigotry that, when joined to levers of official power, typifies rejection of personal freedoms by ceding essential human rights to the state. When Jackie Shane sang, “I’m coming down with a heartache,” she was ceding nothing, merely acknowledging what many of us already know to be true; with freedoms come the cost of loss and failure, often paid for with inordinately intense periods of stress and frustration, or, as Shane puts it, “I ain’t sick but I got a fever/blood pressure’s runnin’ high/pulse ain’t right/I can’t sleep at night….” Comin’ Down’s tone is impenitent, a defiance so deeply ingrained within the rhythm and blues/gospel experience that we sometimes forget how closely enjoined it is to marginalization, that chillingly segregationist dynamic of Trump’s “great” America. Born in 1940, in Nashville, Shane spent the formative years of her career as an itinerant circuit musician before finally settling in Toronto, where she became associated with what was known as the Toronto Sound; other associated musical acts included David Clayton Thomas, Steppenwolf, the Mynah Birds, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, among others; in short, a dense concentration of musical talent so volatile that participation in it guaranteed a competitive environment in which artists self-incentivized to create what had never before been heard. Jackie Shane’s emotional power is the voice of our desperate anger seeking to justify itself on the grounds that an unwritten ethical code has been violated; You did me wrong. It’s the same tone with which Little Richard once sang, Awopbopaloobop! It’s the same tone with which Robbie Robertson once coaxed Bob Dylan to follow when he soloed on Leopard Print Pillbox Hat. It’s the same tone we sense becoming combustible as we improvise an argument against a loved one, fast approaching the irremediable while entangled in feelings that were once clearly defined by generosity but are now taken over by enmity alone. Shane left Tennessee while still in her teens, suffering moral repulsion because of the effects of Jim Crow, and it was during this time away from home that, publicly, she began to present as female performer. Conceivably, the deeper Shane reached into herself for creative expression, the stronger became the pieces of self she’d pulled together for cohesion into a unifying whole. When an artist introduces risk—personal, artistic—as a categorical imperative into her art, she transforms the pop experience from a largely commercial enterprise into a crisis response, an alarm; record executives have no problem marketing cultural excitement to awaiting demographics thirsty for originality. But they did fear a fearless trans performer who understood that only putting her body on the line—the same way Elvis and Little Richard and Patsy Cline and Tina Turner did it—would complete the terms of her artistic promise. Comin’ Down may be one of the greatest sixities B-sides released, a teen dance masterpiece whose clamorous beauty comes with the distressing news that our democratic freedoms are now as threadbare as the poor girl’s yesterday’s gown.