Jackie DeShannon

Few performers have enjoyed as versatile a career as Jackie DeShannon, and although she made a couple of well-remembered Top Ten pop hits in the '60s, she's never achieved the level of success or artistic recognition she deserves. Starting as a pop-rockabilly singer as a teenager in the late '50s, she quickly developed into one of the L.A. pop scene's hottest songwriters, penning hits for Brenda Lee, the Fleetwoods, and Irma Thomas, and often collaborating with fellow noted songwriter Shari Sheeley. One of the first established rock figures to see the potential for crossbreeding rock and folk, 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." Using the circular, jangling guitar lines that would become a prime feature of early folk-rock, both of those songs were covered by the Searchers for much bigger hits; she 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,"...