Jackie DeShannon
By All Music Guide
By All Music Guide
DeShannons famous affiliations and success as a songwriter have sometimes obscured her own enormous talents. Shes a superb singer, capable of both sweet allads 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-Davids What the World Needs Now Is Love, which made the Top Ten 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 another Top Ten hit 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.
