Classic Clips: Jackie DeShannon “When You Walk In The Room” – Later with Jools Holland, 2012

Back in the time before AI, when songwriters sat at typewriters in New York’s Brill Building or Holland-Dozier-Holland churned out hits for Motown, a small-town country girl from Kentucky called Sharon Lee Myers was attempting to break into the music business. A child star on regional radio, she covered songs by the country stars of the day. Coming from a family steeped in country-blues artists like Jimmy Reed and Bobby Blue Bland, the young singer-songwriter became friends with Elvis Presley, singing gospel music with his vocal quartet The Jordanaires.

Persuaded by Eddie Cochran to move to Los Angeles in 1960, she became Jackie DeShannon, a name deliberately androgynous to counter the misogyny that permeated the record industry of the day. After a couple of very minor chart placings in her homeland, two singles saw her start to gain traction in 1963. The first was a Sonny Bono/Jack Nitzsche song, ‘Needles and Pins’, which DeShannon maintained she had co-written without receiving a credit. This was followed with ‘When You Walk In The Room’, a song she most definitely did write.

Liverpool group The Searchers picked up on the first of these during their stint at The Star Club in Hamburg. Released in 1964, it went to Number 1 on the UK charts and placed high on the Billboard 100 in the US. Unsurprisingly the group followed this with ‘When You Walk In The Room’, keeping the distinctive 12-string guitar though not going with the Spector-like production of DeShannon’s version.

Part of the so-called ‘British Invasion’, The Searchers’ made an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show which may have led to a spike in interest in DeShannon’s output. She was also helped by her touring as the opening act in support of The Beatles in a house band that featured a young Ry Cooder. Still leaning westward towards Los Angeles, where she would become part of the Laurel Canyon scene, De Shannon also enjoyed a sojourn in England where she wrote for Marianne Faithfull and formed a songwriting and personal relationship with Jimmy Page, at that time an art student and part-time session guitarist.

As testimony to the enduring popularity of this song, ‘When You Walk In The Room’ has been covered over several decades by acts as diverse as Paul Carrack, Bruce Springsteen, country singer Pam Tillis, Abba’s Agnetha Fältskog and even Status Quo. Yet Jackie DeShannon remains one of those artists whose talents are more appreciated by her peers than the wider public. Van Morrison is an admirer, and she co-wrote with Randy Newman. Far from a one-hit wonder, her biggest solo success came in 1969 with ‘Put a Little Love in Your Heart’, later covered by Annie Lennox and Al Green. Her composition ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ for Kim Carnes won the Grammy for Song of the Year in 1981 and in 2010 she entered the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame.

Jackie DeShannon’s appearance on Jools Holland’s Later in 2012 acknowledged her contribution to music over the years. With so many songs in her portfolio, her choice of ‘When You Walk In The Room’ is telling. Deceptively simple, with lyrics that include the inventive rhyming of ‘want’ with ‘nonchalant’, there’s something very special about this song, and about her.