The Legend of Jan Terri

I have featured Chicago-based singer and songwriter Jan Terri on the blog before, briefly mentioning the outsider music legend in the 2018 Christmas cavalcade, but its high time she had a dedicated post all of her own. There can be no question that she deserves it.

 

Born Janice Spagnolia on 17 June 1959, the showbiz bug bit early. Jan’s father was an aspiring singer, who used to perform in local bars in costume as Elvis, and in blackface as Sammy Davis Junior (she denies he was ever known as the Black Elvis, despite what you may have read elsewhere). When she was just five years old Jan, who grew up in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park, would perform Beatles and Elvis numbers for her school friends, complete with cheap guitar and Beatle wig.

 

She graduated in 1983, having earned a B.A. in Broadcast Communications and a Management Certificate for Sound Engineering from Columbia College. While studying, she took an internship at a recording studio run by local country bar band the Windy City Cowboys. Jan became their backup singer, and performed with them at local bars and weddings. At the same time, she began writing her own material.

 

Personal issues within her family meant putting her career on hold: Jan did not resurface until the 1990s when, while working as a limousine driver, she started recording her own material. She spent her hard earned cash and recorded half a dozen of her compositions, and made video clips to accompany them. She assembled press kits and sent them to every record company she could think of, and gave VHS tapes of her videos to various clients at the limousine service. Two self-financed albums followed, Baby Blues (1992) and High Risk (1994).

Then one of Jan’s press kits ended up in the hands of Marilyn Manson.

 

Manson was so impressed with Terri's winningly inept, yet heartfelt, enthusiasm that he brought her out to open for him at the Aragon Theatre in 1998, and she appeared as his opening act at concerts in Chicago in 1998 and 1999. She also appears in his 1999 live video God Is In The TV. Television appearances followed and her early videos started to attract attention. Losing You, from Baby Blues (which makes excellent use of Jan’s limousine), went viral - well, what amounted to viral back in the last century - and it looked like fame, of sorts, was to follow.

 

Sadly Jan was forced to put her career on hold again: she spent eight years looking after her mother (who suffered from dementia) until she passed in 2008, and in 2002 she was involved in a bad traffic accident. But in those years, while she was in a kind of forced retirement, things changed. In 2005 YouTube debuted and very soon after Jan became an international sensation. Suddenly she was an international star.

 

New recordings surfaced, including her first new album in 20 years, Wild One (2012, although much of the album was recorded back in 1997), and Holiday Songs (2014) along with the infamous 2011 comeback single Excuse My Christmas.

 

Today Jan considers herself to be retired, however recordings continue to surface, mostly digital and available from her Bandcamp page, including the planned 2013 album, I'm A Horsie (now titled High Risk), and the 2014 collection No Rules, No Boundaries. If you like what you hear please go to her page and support her: you can even order yourself a signed photograph or even a personal phone call! She is currently trying to crowdfund a new album, and you can help HERE

 

Here are a couple of my personal favourites from Jan’s catalogue: Journey to Mars and her wonderful version of Ave Maria.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Journey HERE

Download Ave HERE