Jackie Venson’s Journey to Joy
Jackie Venson got a priceless piece of career advice when she was 13 years old: “My dad told me that I had to start singing if I wanted to make any money in this business.” Speaking by phone from her home in Austin, as her miniature dachshund Jack plays nearby, she explains her dad’s reasoning. “Bands that have singers make more money; they get more gigs,” she says. “If you’re a singer and you play an instrument also, you’re making the money of two players now. You save that money, you pay yourself and everybody else more. It’s just business.”
By the time Jackie’s father, longtime Austin-based musician Andrew Venson, imparted this advice to his youngest child, she was already a dedicated musician in her own right. Bumping against the confines of her rigid classical piano training, she started taking voice lessons a few years later. She even tried singing for audiences, but never could match the technical chops and self-assuredness of the theater singers she had grown up admiring. “I was 16 when I sang out in high school for the first time. I had played the piano for almost ten years at that point,” she remembers. “I didn’t sound bad, but I knew I sounded timid. I just knew. I was like, ‘Man, I don’t sound like those people on Broadway.’”