Jo Ann Campbell

Jo Ann Campbell occupies a special niche in rock & roll. For starters, she wrote songs, and they were good enough to get released as singles, not buried on her albums. Her most successful records were clearly in a mainstream pop music vein, anticipating the work of teen girl pop singers such as Shelley Fabares, but she could also rock out like Wanda Jackson. A surprising number of her recordings were rough and tough, their obvious "cute" quotient balanced by Campbell's occasional raspy-throated delivery, which betrayed lust, or at least a healthy female libido in need of stroking. And the song that remains the best known today, "Mama, Can I Go Out?" (which never charted but was featured in Alan Freed's jukebox movie Go Johnny Go), is a great tribute to healthy female interest in the opposite sex -- which, as we know, was at least half of what rock & roll was ultimately supposed to be about. Campbell took music and dance lessons as a child, and was drum majorette at Fletcher High School in Jacksonville, Florida. At age 16, in 1955, she did a USO tour of Europe as a dancer -- such tours didn't pay anything, but gave the participants a chance to travel and see the world while honing their skills as entertainers and performers, and this was precisely what Campbell did. When the tour was over, she felt ready for the big time and headed for New York, where she initially joined the Johnny Conrad Dancers. It was while in New York that she decided to try singing. She was fortunate enough to get featured on television's Colgate Comedy Hour and The Milton Berle Show, and later proved a huge success at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. In 1956, she was signed to the Eldorado label, which had her record an original song, "Come On Baby," as her debut single. This was followed by a more...