Jackie DeShannon Artistfacts

August 21, 1941
Jackie DeShannon was one of the first women of the rock era to make a lasting name for herself as both a singer and a songwriter. Born Sharon Lee Myers in Hazel, Kentucky, she built her career on material that crossed country, pop, folk, and R&B.
Her first exposure to music came at weekend family gatherings, where her father and uncle played country tunes leaning toward the Delmore Brothers' country blues. "I started singing when I was 3," she told Mojo magazine. "It was all very natural to me. I was about that age when we went to see a Tex Ritter concert and I jumped out of my seat in the middle of the show, running up on stage freaking out, just wanting to sing with him. That's how I got my start."
DeShannon's musical tastes broadened when her family moved from Kentucky to Illinois. She found herself drawn to R&B after hearing records by Bobby "Blue" Bland and Jimmy Reed late at night on Nashville's WLAC. "I was always in that group of kids that was much more into the original recordings, as opposed to the Pat Boone stuff where he would cover Little Richard's hits," she recalled.
Her songwriting began out of sheer necessity while working on a radio show with the hillbilly comedy duo Homer and Jethro. "I was complaining to them, 'I can't find any songs,'" DeShannon recalled. "And they said, 'Well, you'll have to start writing them.' That was my inspiration to start. I mean, I'd written some poetry here and there, but my big goal was to have original material, because that's what people were looking for back in the day. Record companies would always want to know, 'Do you have any songs?'
DeShannon's career took shape in the early rock era, a time when a strong voice and a sharp ear for material mattered just as much as image. She became famous not only for performing timeless tracks like "What the World Needs Now Is Love" and "Put a Little Love in Your Heart," but also for writing iconic songs that became massive hits for other artists, including "When You Walk In The Room" and "Bette Davis Eyes."
Her breakthrough as a live performer came in 1964 when she opened for The Beatles on their first US tour. That exposure significantly elevated her public profile, proving how easily she could pivot between being an artist's artist and a genuine mainstream star.
In 1965, DeShannon formed a songwriting partnership with Jimmy Page, which resulted several songs, including "Don't Turn Your Back On Me" and "In My Time Of Sorrow," which was recorded by Marianne Faithfull.
As one of the first female singer-songwriters to break through in rock and pop, she became an essential trailblazer for future generations of women writing their own music. Touching on teen pop, country, rockabilly, gospel, soul, and folk, her versatility helped her stay relevant through constantly shifting pop trends.
DeShannon has been married twice: first to Liberty Records executive Irving "Bud" Dain from 1966 to 1967, and later to singer-songwriter and film composer Randy Edelman, whom she wed in 1976. She told Mojo that her second marriage thrived because "we're interested in so many of the same things" and "both being artists, you understand the nature of the lifestyle."
She continued to record later in her career, releasing in 2011 When You Walk in the Room, an acoustic collection containing reworked versions of her best-known songs.
On June 17, 2010, DeShannon's decades of influence were formally recognized when she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

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