All girl rock band formed by rhythm guitarist / lead vocalist Jan Morrison who was originally from West Virgina, guitarist Jo Kellum from Brooklyn, adding drummer Edie Lippincott (drums). They went through a number of male lead guitarists until around 1959 when Jo took over on lead guitar. By the late ‘50s Carla Mandley (from East Baltimore) began filling in on drums and then replaced Edie.
Jo recalled that “as a musician, Jan could play a rhythm guitar like no one else, she was great… and her voice, for an untrained voice she could make Patsy Cline look sad. She was good, very good!” Carla recalled “we played the whole gamut of music… cha-chas, polkas, tangos, Top-40, rockabilly… whatever you wanted we did it and we packed the house.”
The group started out as a rock-a-billy band, playing their first gigs at Mary’s on the corner of Fleet and Washington Streets, and the Yorktown on Monument Street. Their attire was white shirts with black ties and black pants with hair slicked back. Jo says the look is described in modern terms as “butch.” As a gay group the girls created social scenes for gay women, and while doing so were subject to harassment from straight patrons and occasional visits from the police force.
They could be seen at the Combo Lounge on West Baltimore Street in 1962. Starting in 1963 they began their longtime gig playing at the Pepper Hill Show Bar Lounge on Gay Street, where they performed almost exclusively until 1967.
“We packed them in” says Jan of the Pepper Hill crowd, “they had a guard at the front door and a guard at the back door, and when two people left the guard would signal down and two people could come in, and they were two and three deep around the block.” As for the band “we never said we were great musicians by far, we weren’t, but we had fun and we connected with the people.”
In 1964 at the height of the British Invasion the group was described by Bernie Lit in his weekly ‘Playboy’ entertainment guide as “Baltimore’s answer to the Beatles – the only all-girlie ladybugs in Baltimore’s nightlife.” The Rock-A-Jets played regularly at Hart’s Tavern off Furnace Branch Road during the summer of 1967, and were a house band at the Satellite Lounge in 1968-69… Through the years they also performed at Higdon’s, Sadie’s, Point Pleasant Beach, The Dead End, Helen’s Hollywood Disco, Blanche’s, and many other venues…
The group folded in 1996 when Jan retired and moved out of state.
Jan & the Rock-A-Jets were inducted in the Maryland Entertainment Hall of Fame in 2013.
Quotes by permission from Jo Kellum from WYPR interview March 6, 2009.
