When lifelong rock singer/songwriter Georgie Jessup leaps from a recording, it’s uncertain whether she’ll land with a love song or a Native American war cry. The first time I heard her perform live, Jessup sang Road to Trinidad from her fourth album, Woman In A Man’s Suit, at an after-hours house concert at Sarah and Desmond’s Vegetarian Café on Main Street in Ellicott City.
You be Amelia Earhart and I’ll be Georgia O’Keefe.
Fly me straight to Heaven, and I’ll paint you a masterpiece.
Take a slow boat with Shirley; we’ll astroplane to the stars.
We’ll talk with the grandmothers and the grandfathers,
And trade tales of electric guitars.
Every cowgirl gets the blues, every cowgirl pays her dues,
And every Johnny thinks we’ll never make it on our own.
When they wake from the dreams they’ve blown, we’ll be in Trinidad.
Fly me straight to Heaven, and I’ll paint you a masterpiece.
Take a slow boat with Shirley; we’ll astroplane to the stars.
We’ll talk with the grandmothers and the grandfathers,
And trade tales of electric guitars.
And every Johnny thinks we’ll never make it on our own.
When they wake from the dreams they’ve blown, we’ll be in Trinidad.
You don’t need to know that Trinidad is a small town in southeastern Colorado where people go for sex-change surgery or anything about Jessup’s life to fall into her artistry.
Road to Trinidad is one of thirteen eclectic songs from the Woman In A Man’s Suit album. The title song is about Jessup’s French/German grandmother, who posed in a man’s three-piece suit for a circa 1912 photo. When Jessup happened across Anna Josephine Roesch’s photo in the late nineties, inspiration popped. She wrote the song describing revelations she believes she experienced ten years earlier when Roesch appeared to her in a dream, and the creative process began. Released in 2006, Woman In A Man’s Suit is different from Jessup’s previous albums.
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| Georgie with Max and Blaze |
In between songs, filmmakers Anthony Greene and Paul Steinmetz scratch at the surface of Jessup’s gender struggles and family influences, but somehow they miss the importance of the Lakota philosophy that is such a huge part of Jessup’s psyche.
Before she recorded Woman In A Man’s Suit, Jessup released American Holocaust, Sweet Grass Smoke (currently entitled Red Cloud’s Room), and Wintke and Crazy Sacred Dogs – albums that challenged listeners’ prejudices and earned five Washington Area Music Association nominations, a 2004 Indian Summer Nomination, and two Silver Arrow Awards (2005 and 2006). The title of American Holocaust (whose proceeds are donated to the Chief Frank Fools Crow Memorial Foundation and Humanitarian Fund) caused so much controversy that some radio stations banned it without even listening to the music.
Her grandmother’s influence, the decades that Jessup suffered in a male body, and the spiritual journey that led her to identify with the Lakota winkte (a two-spirited person, a woman in a man’s body) are irrevocably intertwined with her music.
Jessup shares her emotional roots in the songs she wrote for Woman In A Man’s Suit. Influenced by the traditional country music, The Love That I Come From is a tender tribute to Jessup’s parents, and Bottom of the Bottle is about Angie (one of the great loves of Jessup’s life), who appears in the documentary. I’m A Werewolf, which you’re likely to hear on the radio at Halloween, is a delta-blues influenced song comparing monsters to transgender people.
The film may not quite explain the autobiographical aspects of her songwriting or give great insight into this complex artist who balances political vitriol with love and raw compassion. But watching it with Jessup in the comfort of her living room does.
The middle-aged, wispy-haired blonde with formidable shoulders sits comfortably in her red flannel cowboy pajamas and denim jacket, gently stroking Max (one of her dogs) and sipping orange juice and amaretto. Jessup’s had surgery and electrolysis to become a woman with porcelain skin and she’s quite pretty in a unisex sort of way. But, although hormones have softened it some, her voice still sounds male. She’s larger-boned than most women, but once she meets your gaze, it doesn’t take long to reconcile her look and her sound; Jessup’s eyes are female.
What takes a little longer to understand is that this very Caucasian-looking woman who thinks and prays as a Lakota was not born with any Native American blood that she knows of. Her spirit name, Beautiful Thunder, took years to interpret from a hint in the dream with her grandmother that came five years after Jessup met Frank Fools Crow in 1983. At the time, she didn’t know that this was the famed Lakota Sioux spiritual leader who had helped negotiate ending the violent insurrection at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, ten years earlier.
She did know that it was a rare honor to be escorted into the occupied Yellow Thunder camp, where white men did not tread. Racial tensions remained extremely high in South Dakota in the early eighties, years after the shootout at Wounded Knee and the sentencing of Leonard Peltier. The American Indian Movement set up the Yellow Thunder camp (named after Raymond Yellow Thunder who was murdered in 1972) in 1981.
Jessup reminisces easily about her early life as a male. Born Wayne George Mauler and the second son of Anne Arundel County residents Mary and Bob Mauler, she was raised by loving parents in a Christian home. Her Pop was Methodist but didn’t like to attend church. Her Ma is Catholic. A typical boy, Jessup grew up playing Cowboys and Indians and sharing a pony, Lic Lic, with her brother. She had her own horse, Troubles, and loved playing football. On the outside, she was all male.
The only bad memory Jessup recalls is the inner struggle that started when she was about four years old. That’s when Jessup first started praying that God would turn her into a little girl.
“I really thought I was evil. I thought that I came directly from the devil – and that I was literally, like my song, The Devil’s Child. That’s where that song comes from.”
Jessup didn’t tell her parents or anyone about her gender issues when she was growing up. Instead, she decided that even if she were the devil’s child, she would refuse to do his bidding. And so she continued to pray.
In her early thirties, Georgie Jessup Mauler was a country-handsome man recently returned from living in California and performing and recording with his R&B band, Georgie Jessup and the Jewels. Jessup was briefly married to “the perfect mate for a rock person, you know, for someone who was doing music…I loved her very much.” But even though she had been up front about her gender issues since the third date with Jacquie, Jessup soon found herself desperate to save a deteriorating marriage.
A fan of Joseph Campbell’s books, Jessup has always been keenly interested in mythology and symbolism. When a guy in her band recommended that Jessup read Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions [co-authored by Richard Erdoes and John (Fire) Lame Deer], the cosmos fell into place.
“It was like bam, bam, bam! There was just so much synchronicity with my own life. It was like almost every chapter dealt with some issue that I was seeking answers for …”
Jessup learned of the wintke and the heyoka, or sacred clown (a Lakota person who thinks upside down and does everything backwards). Since there was a traditional ceremony that could take away the responsibility of being a heyoka, Jessup hoped there was a way to remove the wintke from her spirit. She wanted to live fully as a man. She needed counsel from someone who knew the old traditions.
One night Jessup and her wife were hanging at Arthur’s on Route 40 when right out of the blue, a Plains Indian crossed the dance floor. At that time Jessup was just as shy about approaching people as she was about discussing her gender issues, but with Jacquie’s encouragement, she mustered the courage to introduce herself. This chance meeting started the journey that would lead Jessup to the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the Black Hills and to Helen Redfeather, who (unbeknownst to Jessup) had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in 1973.
In 1983, Redfeather and her husband Chris Fire Thunder took Jessup into Yellow Thunder Camp where families were living in tipis, passing through a gate and guardhouse where the American flag flew upside down. Then Redfeather took Jessup out to meet Grandpa Fools Crow at his home in Kyle, South Dakota.
As he was changing his regalia between ceremonies, Fools Crow heard Jessup’s request without an interpreter. Jessup had been told that Fools Crow didn’t speak English and was surprised when he answered in English. Fools Crow told Jessup to go to the sacred ground of Wounded Knee the next morning, promising to meet her there to “pray with the pipe.” It took more than a decade for Jessup to understand the significance of this event, and that Fools Crow hadn’t shown up because he didn’t need to be physically present to pray with her. Instead of a cure for her gender struggles, Jessup found acceptance.
“Here was a people that I admired but I never in my wildest dreams thought they could accept someone like me at all – I just couldn’t even fathom it. That was like a revelation to me.”
Jessup wrote Fools Crow for the American Holocaust album to honor the great medicine man when he died in1989.
Eyes that see right through me, a heart that feels the pain
A smile that’s gonna heal with a love that never ends
His body’s in his Mother Earth, his spirit’s in the sky
Will you come to see me one day, will you teach me how to fly?
Fools Crow, Fools Crow
A smile that’s gonna heal with a love that never ends
His body’s in his Mother Earth, his spirit’s in the sky
Will you come to see me one day, will you teach me how to fly?
Fools Crow, Fools Crow
“I am not Lakota by blood so I do not claim to follow their traditions to any ‘letter of the law’ but Fools Crow is who I base my practices on and who I strive to be more like. He was the closest thing to what I believe Jesus was or any other holy man that left his or her mark on generations. He was the real deal! He could have exploited his abilities and been a millionaire several times over if he wanted, but he lived a very modest existence,” Jessup explains.
Jessup has lived on the fringe most of her life, both in the music business and in her love affairs. At age 57, and living halfway between Baltimore and DC, just a few miles from the Maryland State prison complex, she’s prevailing in the music world but still struggling to make it a living. At times she’s disappointed, perhaps even a bit jaded, about the lack of support she’s felt from both the Native American and GLBT communities.
“When I put out American Holocaust, I honestly thought that I would get some support from the Native American community. There weren’t very many artists, Native or non-Native, who were saying the kinds of things I was saying that desperately needed to be stated. But they didn’t and part of the reason they didn’t was because I wasn’t blood,” she explains.
Jessup believes that the gay community would rather see a drag show than a real singer/songwriter.
“Only recently have I gotten any fan base from those groups. The music business only sees the value in big bucks instead of quality. If I were to wear high heels and corsets and tons of makeup, they would market me. They want someone that the people can hate or laugh at or jerk off to! But promoting a singer/songwriter who happens to be transgender...no use at all…and I’m not sure how to combat that.”
Jessup, who’s not in a relationship at present, surrounds herself with family photos (the picture of Roesch hangs in her living room) and memoirs from her childhood. She remains close to her widowed mother. Her Pop owned a wholesale business that sold toys online and Jessup has a prolific collection of vintage figurines on horseback, including Crazy Horse and the Lone Ranger. She points out her favorites as she gives me a tour of the rehearsal studio downstairs.
Jessup’s cape cod home is named after an aunt, Edith May, whose estate helped finance it and who took an interest in Jessup’s music. Set away from the main road down a winding gravel driveway, it is located just a few miles from the house she was raised in where her Ma still lives. She has two dogs, her boys Max and Blaze, and lives with a roommate.
The neighbors are afraid to confront her.
Woman In A Man’s Suit can be downloaded from iTunes along with Jessup’s newest release, Working Class Hero. Her concert schedule is posted at www.georgiejessup.com.
Jessup hands me two gifts as I leave – a copy of her latest CD Working Class Hero, and a copy of her recent single, When You Sang You Are My Sunshine.
I think about some lyrics from one of my favorite Jessup songs, Balance Wheel.
She always hoped she’d find love before she died
If she never would she knew she could survive
She learned to wear her heart where everyone could see
She learned and paid the price, nothing comes for free
Patient hearts, passive strength, love is revealed
If she never would she knew she could survive
She learned to wear her heart where everyone could see
She learned and paid the price, nothing comes for free
Patient hearts, passive strength, love is revealed
So strong for so long she turns the balance wheel
And about the way Jessup signs her e-mails.
Fighting the good fight with peace, love, and understanding
“Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.” Techumseh
“Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.” Techumseh
A sign by the front door that reads Edith May’s Paradise is not visible in the dark.
