#100: Any Other Way by Jackie Shane

City: Toronto, ON
Radio Station: CHUM
Peak Month: April 1963
Peak Position in Toronto ~ #2
Peak Position in Vancouver ~ did not chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube: “Any Other Way”
Lyrics: “Any Other Way”

Jackie Shane was born in 1940 in Nashville, Tennessee. Her grandmother’s singing around the house had an influence on Shane’s vocal development. Further encouragement from her grandmother allowed her to display her vocal talents as she progressed in age. By the age of five she was dressing as a girl, and by thirteen she told her mother she was a woman in a man’s body. Jackie Shane began her music career as a young teen, demonstrating vocal and rhythmic ability. This was noticed by Louis Lavelle, who recruited Shane and Les Monday to form a musical trio. They performed at a variety of small gigs, including at local fairgrounds and on radio stations. Initially a drummer as well as a vocalist, Shane would play drums standing up while singing. Shane’s drumming talent led to studio session work as a drummer, including on Lillian Offitt’s “Miss You So” in the summer of 1957. Working in Nashville regularly as a stage performer during the late 1950s, Shane also worked in the studio as a drummer on tracks by Larry Williams, Big Maybelle, Gatemouth Brown, Little Willie John, Joe Tex, and other performers.

In 1958, she witnessed a group of white men chase a black man down near the bus stop where she and a friend were waiting. She witnessed this man violently beaten and then carelessly thrown into a dumpster nearby. This later influenced her decision to flee the Jim Crow South. Shane joined a traveling carnival and arrived in Cornwall, Ontario, in 1959. In 1960, Shane moved to Montreal, Quebec, where saxophonist “King” Herbert Whitaker invited her to watch Frank Motley and his Motley Crew at the Esquire Show Bar. At one point during the show, Motley and pianist Curley Bridges invited Shane, then presenting as a man, onstage for the next set, where she performed songs by Ray Charles and Bobby “Blue” Bland.

Jackie Shane became Bland’s lead vocalist and relocated to Toronto with them in late 1961. She returned several times to the United States, on tour with the Motley Crew, to New York to record, to visit her family and old friends and perform on a TV show in Nashville, and to live and work in Los Angeles where she played drums in recording sessions. Shane was friends with Little Richard when she lived in Nashville and played drums in his backing band on occasion.

Shane recorded several tracks in 1960, including a cover of Barrett’s “Money (That’s What I Want)” and a version of Lloyd Price’s “I’ve Really Got the Blues”. However, none of the tracks were issued at the time; they eventually came out in 1965. Jackie Shane’s first issued recording was “Any Other Way” in the fall of 1962.

In “Any Other Way” the narrator is approached by a friend who’s trying to find out how they are feeling since a recent breakup. But the friend is asking on behalf of the ex-girlfriend “my baby.” The narrator knows when he passes by people he knows they whisper “there he goes with a broken heart.” But his word to the friend is to tell them – and anyone else who wants to know – that the way things are now that he’s single, he wouldn’t want them “any other way.” He adds, “Tell her that I’m happy. Tell her that I’m gay.” (And in 1963, ‘gay’ was understood as a synonym for being happy, carefree, merry).

“Any Other Way” was originally released by singer-songwriter William Bell in 1962. The single stalled beneath the Billboard Hot 100 at #131. Bell was born William Yarbrough in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee. He took the last name “Bell” as a stage name in honor of his grandmother, whose first name was Belle. William Bell sang in church as a child and considered himself a student of The Soul Stirrers, the popular gospel group led by Sam Cooke. At age ten, he began songwriting with the original composition “Alone on a Rainy Night”. At the age of 14, Bell won a talent contest and began making a name for himself singing in Memphis-area clubs.

Bell made his first leap into the music scene backing Rufus Thomas. In 1957, Bell recorded his first sides as a member of the Del Rios, a teenage vocal group on the Stax label. His seventieth single release, “I Forgot to Be Your Lover”, was his first Top Ten hit on the Black Soul Singles chart. In 1976, he had his only number-one Hot Soul Singles hit “Tryin’ to Love Two”. He has received two Grammy Award nominations, winning one. And he has received four Blues Music Award nominations. He has been inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame.

“Any Other Way” peaked at #2 in Toronto, #5 in Washington DC, and Bethesda (MD).

In the summer of 1963, “In My Tenement” charted on WMCA in New York City, reached the Top 20 in Endicott (NY) and also charted in Buffalo.

From the age of thirteen, Shane identified herself as a girl, but was consistently misgendered. Shane never publicly addressed her gender identity or sexual orientation until the last years of her life. She wore very feminine clothing during her performances, but her everyday clothes were considered more androgynous. Many at the time thought Shane resembled a masculine or butch lesbian, as she wore glittering suits on stage and wore her hair up. Jackie Shane was offered an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1965, but refused as the booking was made conditional on her presenting as male. She identified as “she” behind closed doors and with close family. But in an interview with the Globe and Mail in 2017, Shane identified as a ‘trans woman.’

Jackie Shane performing in the mid-60s

In 1967, Shane charted “Stand Up Straight And Tall” in Belleville (ON). She released a cover of the Eddie Floyd R&B hit “Knock On Wood” later that year. She also released her first album that year Jackie Shane Live. The liner notes let listeners know Jackie Shane was in a category all her own. The album was recorded live from the Saphire Tavern in downtown Toronto.

Warning: This album is not meant for squares! You’ve got to be down with it, and can’t quit it baby. You’ve not only got to know what’s happening child, you’ve got to be part of it. Okay swingers…hang on, ’cause Jackie’s gonna do it to you like you’ve never been done before…. When you listen to Jackie, you know he’s got it (soul). Lots of it. Jackie sings what he feels the way he feels it. He’s been doing it since he was fourteen years old.  

The liner notes presented Jackie Shane in 1967 as a man, though in 1965, Shane had declined a spot on The Ed Sullivan Show when the show wanted her to present as a male. There was likely some ambivalence about performing that way to such a large audience, while it was fine to present as a male at a smaller gay tavern in Toronto in the late sixties.

Her seventh and final single release was in 1970 with “Cruel Cruel World”. Three bootleg albums were released between 2000 and 2011.

Shane left Toronto in 1971 to care for her aunt, Jessie Shane, who lived in Los Angeles. According to the documentary Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, Shane returned to Nashville sometime in the late 1970s with her aunt to care for her biological mother and stepfather, both of whom were ailing.

For a time she was rumored to have died by suicide or to have been stabbed to death in the 1990s, but in fact she had retired from music, and moved home to Nashville from Los Angeles. She kept in touch with Frank Motley, who put a Toronto record collector in touch with her in the mid 1990s. This news was relayed to a small number of her old musician friends, a few of whom contacted her. One, Steve Kennedy, discussed with Shane the possibility of organizing and staging a reunion concert, but this never materialized.

In the summer of 2017, the reissue label Numero Group announced that they would be releasing a double-LP/CD compilation of Shane’s music, Any Other Way, on October 20, 2017. The album marked the first time since her final single that Shane was directly involved in the production and release of a reissue of her music. It compiled her singles and recordings of her live. The album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Historical Album. In an interview with Elio Iannacci of The Globe and Mail, Shane stated she was planning to return to Toronto to perform live for the first time in nearly five decades.

In 2019, Shane granted a broadcast interview to CBC Radio One’s Q. The interview was conducted by Elaine Banks, who had been the producer and host of “I Got Mine”, and it was Shane’s first broadcast interview since the end of her performing career. In the interview, she confirmed that she returned home to the United States to take care of her ailing aunt, but stated that she regretted not having chosen to bring her mother to Toronto instead.

Shane died in her sleep, at her home in Nashville, in February 2019.

A heritage plaque was unveiled on June 23, 2023, the start of Pride weekend in Toronto, at the Victoria and Richmond location of the former Saphire Tavern. A public mural on the side of a building on Yonge Street also includes a portrait of Shane as one of several images commemorating the street’s live music scene of the 1960s.

October 28, 2026
Ray McGinnis

References:
“The late Jackie Shane in her own words: A rare interview with the pioneering musician,” CBC, February 8, 2019.
“Toronto soul musician Jackie Shane returns to spotlight with Grammy nomination,” Rabble, Penney Kome, January 3, 2019.
“Jackie Shane, pioneering transgender soul singer, dead at 78,” CBC, February 22, 2019.
Elaine Banks, “I Got Mine: The Story of Jackie Shane,” CBC, February 28, 2010.
Rachel Horn, “Songs We Love: William Bell, ‘The Three Of Me’,” NPR, March 24, 2016.

CHUM Hit Parade | CHUM 1050-AM Toronto (ON) | April 1, 1963