For a brief shining moment in the 1960s, Black trans soul singer Jackie Shane seemed to be turning into a star. That is, until she inexplicably vanished.
“This is a woman who disappeared off the face of the earth for 45 years and nobody knew if she was alive or dead,” says Michael Mabbott, co-director of the forthcoming documentary Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story. “As a filmmaker, that’s an intriguing thing in itself.”
The simultaneously sad and triumphant tale of a groundbreaker before her time is the crux of the film. Co-directed by Mabbott along with Lucah Rosenberg-Lee and co-produced by Elliot Page, it brushes away the dust and traces Shane’s stunning rise as a trans singer during an inhospitable period. The result of her quest is a long-overdue reclamation of Shane’s musical legacy. “This theme of erasure was such a guiding light for working on this project,” says Rosenberg-Lee, who is Black and trans himself. “I recognize how much of our history is lost.”
Shane, a native of the American South before moving to Toronto to escape the suffocating effects of Jim Crow, subsequently made waves with a song that inspired the film’s name, the breezy horn- and drum-fueled “Any Other Way.” Along with landing on Billboard’s Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart, it became a hit in Canada in 1962. And yet, despite Shane’s fleeting fame, Mabbott hadn’t heard of the performer until about a decade ago when he came across a bootleg of Jackie Shane Live! When he discovered she had been missing since 1971, his interest was further piqued.
“It was staggering that she was from my hometown [of Toronto] and I didn’t know who she was,” Mabbott says. After Numero Group reissued her music in 2017 (a compilation of her career later won a Grammy Award for best historical album), it was revealed she was indeed still alive. From there, Mabbott attempted to get in touch — to no avail — before discovering she was living as a recluse in Nashville. Shane eschewed the music industry for myriad reasons, from caring for the woman she regarded as her mother to avoiding the discrimination that had plagued her career from the start.
“Our first phone call lasted four hours,” says Mabbott, who recalls how Shane had an endless supply of vivid memories from her too-brief career — and was ready for a second chapter. “We spoke every week for over a year,” helping the two form a close bond. “She eventually said, ‘Let’s work on this documentary.’ ”
Unfortunately, as plans were coalescing, Shane died in her sleep in February 2019. “Her death was all the more tragic because she was ready to come back,” Mabbott says. “She felt the timing of this was important to her and that her message had to be heard now more than ever.”
With that, the filmmakers tackled her journey with added vigor to piece together the puzzle of a remarkable life. Luckily, Shane had scrupulously preserved the artifacts of her career, from acetate recordings to homemade jewelry. Mabbott, who worked with Shane’s long-lost family and a music anthropologist to excavate her legacy, calls the treasure trove she left behind “a documentarian’s dream.”
The final product, which premiered at South by Southwest in March, tells a story the filmmakers hope will spur audiences to both reflect and feel inspired. As Rosenberg-Lee explains, “To have people watch the movie, feel connected to it and see that, ‘Wow, people like this have been around for a long time doing their thing…’ It’s very gratifying for sure.”
This story originally appeared in the June 22, 2024, issue of Billboard.
