From:   "jean.marc.pezet 
Date:  Wed Aug 21, 2002  2:57 am
Subject:  Born To Be With You: Jackie De Shannon
 
JACKIE DE SHANNON (By Dik de Heer)

Born Sharon Lee Myers, 21 August 1942, Hazel, Kentucky

Singer / songwriter.
Jackie is a prolific songwriter with more than 600
compositions to her name.
Her early career embraced rockabilly, country, folk and
gospel and her first records hid her true identity under
a number of borrowed names, such as Sherry Lee, Jackie
Dee and Jackie Shannon and the Cajuns. Her first twelve
singles (1956-1961) have been documented in Now Dig This
181 (April 1998). Probably the best known of these
is "Buddy" (credited to Jackie Dee, Liberty 55148), which
has been reissued on several rockabilly compilations.
Already then she wrote most of her own material, which was
most unusual for the late fifties when female singer-
songwriters were a rarity.
After moving to L.A. in 1960, she quickly developed into
one of the hottest songwriters on the West Coast pop
scene, penning hits for Brenda Lee, the Fleetwoods, and
Irma Thomas, often collaborating with fellow noted
songwriter Sharon Sheeley. She was a crucial midwife to
the birth of folk-rock, with the wonderful
singles "Needles and Pins" and "When You Walk in the
Room" (both covered by the Searchers, who had much bigger
hits with them).
Jackie also wrote "Don't Doubt Yourself Babe," covered by
the Byrds on their first album, and penned a couple of
Marianne Faithfull's early hits. In the mid-'60s, she
also found time to write some songs with then-sessionman
Jimmy Page, and perform as an opening act for the Beatles
on the group's first big American tour.
DeShannon's famous affiliations and success as a
songwriter have sometimes obscured her own enormous
talents. She's a superb singer, capable of both sweet
ballads and (more satisfyingly) a gutsy, soulfully husky
delivery. She performed her own material with an honest,
vulnerable, intelligent intensity that pre-figured the
singer/songwriter movement by several years, and
demonstrated command of pop, soul, hard rock, girl group,
and country styles. Her greatest success, however, came
not with her own material, but with Bacharach-
David's "What the World Needs Now Is Love," which went to
# 7 in 1965. Perhaps as a result, she gravitated toward
more middle-of-the-road pop sounds in the last half of
the '60s, though she cut a good deal of strong
material, by both herself and emerging writers like Randy
Newman, Tim Hardin, and Warren Zevon. The soft rock "Put
a Little Love in Your Heart" gave her her biggest hit (#
4) in 1969, and she made some well-received
singer/songwriter albums in the 1970s. One of the songs
from her '70s LPs, "Bette Davis Eyes," became a number
one hit for Kim Carnes in 1981.

CD: What the world needs now is... Jackie De Shannon :
The definitive collection (EMI 8 829786 2). 28 Liberty
and Imperial recordings.
Her official website, http://www.jackiedeshannon.com/
doesn't have too much to offer. Much more info can be
found at: http://members.tripod.com/~jackiedeshannon/