Jackie Scott liked the blues in a passive way, but had never seen a live blues show until she and her husband strolled into Town Point Park more than a decade ago and saw Buddy Guy. Not long after, she saw Guy, B.B. King, John Hiatt, and Susan Tedeschi at the Verizon Amphitheater in Virginia Beach.
"When I left there, I was hooked," she recalls. "I always said I was going to join a blues band when my son went away to school, but that sealed the deal."
Scott's only experience singing was in church at Mount Hermon Baptist Church, but that didn't give her the least bit of pause. She started immersing herself in the blues. She was ambitious, passionate, a woman on a mission from God, as Jake and Elwood would say.
That mission over a decade culminated last year with the release of "Going to the Westside," by Jackie Scott and the Housewreckers, a critically acclaimed collection of blues originals from the Norfolk resident.
It's testimony to Scott's passion and ambition from the time she fell in love with the blues at those shows. She quickly found Jimmie Silvia, a local blues player and aficionado. "He gave me my foundation in the blues," she says.
From that beginning, she "fumbled around" looking for that something that she really liked in a genre that's wide and deep. That's when karmic coincidence entered. She went to a wedding in Chicago and a friend took her downtown to see the blues. And, as you do when you're in Chicago and the joints don't close until 4 a.m. she listened to the blues all night long at the Checkerboard in Hyde Park and B.L.U.E.S. on Halstead further north in Lincoln Park. That was it. The blues -- the rough and tumble Chicago blues -- became her passion.
"When I came back home, I told my husband I wanted to understudy in Chicago," she adds. "Until then, I didn't know what style I liked or liked me. And I don't know whether it found me or I found it, but we get along pretty good."
She became a Youtube devotee, checking out one act after another. There, she became fans of Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton, Koko Taylor, Etta James, Sonny Boy Williamson, B.B. King, Johnny Copeland, and Albert Collins.
She answered an advertisement for a blues singer at a local music store and began fronting The Black Rose Band in local clubs.
Then she heard a song online, "Oil and Water" by Nellie "Tiger" Travis "When I heard that song, I went to see where she was playing and I booked a flight to Chicago to go to that club and meet her," she recalls.
Scott walked into the club just as Travis was introducing..."Oil and Water." Destiny struck again. Travis asked if anybody knew who first recorded the tune. "You did," Scott hollered.
"Where you from?" asked Travis.
From then on, Scott was "Jackie from Virginia. After the show, the two met and talked.
"I knew I was missing something and I need more," Scott says. "All that singing experience in church was about worshipping. It is vertical. That was not teaching me to be an entertainer. When you sing out in public, it's horizontal. You allow your music and the way you bring it across to communicate with the audience."
She began "understudying," making weekend pilgrimages to Chicago, where in the intimate clubs she had opportunities to meet people like Eddie Shaw, the sax player for Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters and heroes like the late Koko Taylor. She went with Travis on gigs as far away as California
"It's only an hour and a half flight," she says. "I'd leave home on Friday and be back home on Sunday and on the job on Monday." Scott still has her day job in the grain merchandising department at the Perdue Farms operation in Norfolk.
After several years, she parted ways with The Black Rose Band and eventually formed the Housewreckers with local guitarist Mark Hopkins as the linchpin.
She'd always been a writer, a doodler, although she'd never declared she was going to sit down and write a song. It still doesn't work that way.
"If I hear somebody say something that catches my ear or things I've heard old people say, I write them down in my notebook. I've also started keeping a voice recorder so if I hear a tune in my head I can get it down," she says. "It may be a month later, two months later, three months later, something will connect."
One day she asked Brad Rosenberg at Norfolk's Clay Gardens Studios how much some recording would cost and, when told, remarked that she was "broke as Dick's hatband, " a line she'd heard all her life. But it was new to Rosenberg and his reaction started her writing. The result is a cut on the album, "Broke as Dick's Hatband,"
For now, Scott is working with Koko Taylor's daughter on some tribute shows this spring, working her day job, and looking forward to some local appearances at the American Theatre and the Chrysler Museum. She has a bunch of new songs, more than she can afford to record.
The blues has captured her and she's not interested in escaping.