I hear thunder boom every time jackie deshannon walks in the room

JACKIE De­SHANNON en­tered 1963 as a 21-year-old singer with fif­teen sin­gles under her belt, not one of them a hit! Hun­dreds of artists who had been more successful—they’d heard thunder boom with at least one hit record!—had come and gone during that time, yet Lib­erty Records showed great faith in her and kept with her through the rest of the decade. ¹

Chris­tened Sharon Lee Myers in 1941, she re­leased her first record in 1956 under the pseu­donym Sherry Lee. She was 15. She re­leased more records, first as Jackie Dee, then as Jackie Shannon. She fi­nally set­tled on Jackie De­Shannon in 1960, al­though it had no ef­fect on her records reaching the charts.

Lib­erty never fig­ured out how to sell Jackie De­Shannon, even though she de­liv­ered ex­cel­lent records to them for ten years.

Things began to change in early ’63 when her soulful reading of Nee­dles And Pins made the na­tional pop charts, peaking at #58 on Cash Box while only reaching #84 on the Bill­board. A few months later, it went all the way to #1 on Canada’s most im­por­tant survey, the weekly chart from CHUM-1050 AM out of Toronto. ²

Jackie De­Shannon was starting to look a little like a suc­cessful recording artist.

Be­fore we go any fur­ther, this ar­ticle was orig­i­nally pub­lished as “When Jackie De­Shannon Walks in the Room She’s Got Zest Ap­peal” on my Rather Rare Records blog in No­vember 2013.

That ar­ticle was been rewritten for pub­li­ca­tion on Medium. It was rewritten, ex­panded, and reti­tled (“Jackie DeShannon’s In­triguing Res­o­nance”) and then pub­lished in 2019 on the Tell It Like It Was pub­li­ca­tion on Medium.

Then that ar­ticle has been slightly rewritten for this article.

An intriguing resonance

In No­vember 1963, Jackie re­leased her own com­po­si­tion When You Walk In The Room as her eigh­teenth single. It was a Spec­to­rian pro­duc­tion with the odd per­cus­sive ef­fect (cas­tanets?) but also fea­tured 12-string gui­tars mixed promi­nently upfront.

A great single, When You Walk In The Room was an­other dis­ap­point­ment, pooping out at #81 on Cash Box and #99 on Bill­board in Jan­uary 1964. But the sound of those guitars—an in­stru­ment oddly ne­glected by rock & rollers be­cause of its as­so­ci­a­tion with folk-type music—was heard by others. ³

In Jan­uary 1964, the Searchers re­leased their ver­sion of Nee­dles And Pins, and, with a nod to the De­Shannon arrange­ment, it fea­tured what sounded like a lovely acoustic 12-string guitar keeping rhythm throughout. Their record topped the UK charts and be­came a big hit in the US and an im­por­tant part of the ini­tial British In­va­sion. ⁴

In Sep­tember, the Searchers re­leased their ver­sion of When You Walk In The Room, which was an­other Top 10 hit in the UK, but only a Top 40 hit in the US. Hoping to ride the British In­va­sion hit back up the charts, Lib­erty reis­sued Jackie’s ver­sion of When You Walk In The Room shortly after the Searchers’ record. ⁵

Again, nothing happened. 

Hollywood a Go-Go!

And that brings me to the raison d’etre for this brief piece on Jackie: to show you her lip-synching to her record on the Hol­ly­wood A Go-Go tele­vi­sion show. This episode of the show (#35) was filmed at KHJ-TV stu­dios in Los An­geles on Au­gust 21, 1965, which was Jackie’s 24th birthday. ⁶

The video gives us Jackie pre­tending to sing along with her single, al­ready an “oldie” in Au­gust 1965. Ex­cept for starting a couple of sec­onds too soon, she does a fine job of lip-synching, a skill many singers never master. She looks good, too, even if you don’t dig early ’60s style and fashion. ⁷

This ar­ticle started out simply to share the video of Jackie De­Shannon dancing and lip-syncing to When You Walk In The Room in 1964.

I can hear the single any­time but I love this video for her little dance steps—they’re pre­dictably safe for ’60s tele­vi­sion but somehow they’re sexier than any pole-dancer I have ever seen! (Of course, that’s an en­tirely sub­jec­tive statement.)

To watch the video, click here.

I love this record today and as­sume that the 12/13-year-old me would have loved it just as much in 1964—if I had ever heard it on the radio. WARM (the “Mighty 590”) may have played it for we teens in north­eastern Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley (“the Valley with the Heart”), but I have no memory of hearing it then. ⁷

Pos­sible rea­sons for the lack of ex­po­sure of this record at the time was that the Bea­tles were every­where and little at­ten­tion was being paid jour­neyman pop singers, es­pe­cially na­tive pop singers.

I hear thunder boom

here are the lyrics to When You Walk In The Room. Re­gard­less of the opening lines and the chiming 12-string guitar that drives the recording along, it’s not a par­tic­u­larly happy song (and the punc­tu­a­tion is mine):

I can feel a new ex­pres­sion on my face.
I can feel a glowing sen­sa­tion taking place.
I can hear the guitar playing a lovely tune,
every time that you walk in the room.

I close my eyes for a second and pre­tend it’s me you want.
Mean­while, I try to act so nonchalant.
I feel a summer night with a magic moon,
every time that you walk in the room.

Maybe it’s a dream come true
standing right along­side of you.
Wish I could tell you how much I care,
but I only have the nerve to stare.

I can feel a some­thing pounding in my brain,
just any­time that someone speaks your name.
Trum­pets sound, I hear thunder boom,
every time that you walk in the room.

It’s about longing and ret­i­cence and un­re­quited love as the singer does nothing be­cause she only has the nerve to stare, not act. It may not be of the same cal­iber as record­ings based on sim­ilar yearning songs such as the Tur­tles’ Happy To­gether or the Temp­ta­tions’ Just My Imag­i­na­tion, but it’s up there.

What the world needs now

Jackie did achieve some suc­cess as a singer: As she was per­forming on Hol­ly­wood A Go-Go, her latest single, What the World Needs Now Is Love, was in the Top 10 on both Bill­board and Cash Box and would once again top the CHUM chart later in the year. She would not have an­other major Amer­ican hit until 1969 when Put A Little Love In Your Heart was her second and last Top 10 hit.

Ar­guably Jackie’s greatest suc­cess as the co-writer (along with Donna Weiss) of Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes. This record spent nine weeks at #1 on the Bill­board Hot 100 and five weeks at the top of the Cash Box Top 100 in 1981. The record won Grammy Awards for “Song of the Year” and “Record of the Year.”

While the song­writing roy­al­ties no doubt swelled her cof­fers, it had no no­tice­able ef­fect on DeShannon’s ca­reer as a recording artist. It did call some at­ten­tion to her own ver­sion of the song, which she had recorded seven years ear­lier. De­spite making one fine record after an­other, she never made it big again as a singer or as a song­writer. ⁹

Jackie DeShannon's 'When You Walk in the Room' is about longing and un­re­quited love as the singer does nothing be­cause she only has the nerve to stare, not act, even though she hears trum­pets sound and thunder boom. Click To Tweet

FEATURED IMAGE: The photo at the top of this page is Jackie De­Shannon in Laurel Canyon in 1968. Whether this is a ca­sual photo taken by a friend or an ac­tual pub­licity shot is un­known. It would have made a great album cover. Weirdly, ex­cept for the cleft chin, Jackie looks strik­ingly like my sister Mary Alice.

Fi­nally, spe­cial thanks to Mike Grif­fiths, who found an ear­lier ver­sion of this ar­ticle, posted a link to it on the Jackie De­Shannon Face­book page, and then kindly sent me a mes­sage alerting me to that posting. This spurred me on to rewrite the older ar­ticle and turn it into two “new” ar­ti­cles: the one above and an­other on Jackie’s el­i­gi­bility for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (coming soon to a screen near you).

FOOTNOTES:

1   Lib­erty moved Jackie over to their sister im­print Im­pe­rial Records in 1965.

2   What The World Needs Now Is Love also reached #1 on the CHUM Chart. Jackie scored a total of seven Top 40 hits on this survey com­pared to only three in the US. This could mean that she was more pop­ular in Canada than any­where else in the world.

3   As an ex­ample of how dif­ferent the sys­tems that Bill­board and Cash Box used to tally their charts, on the Cash Box Top 100, Jackie DeShannon’s When You Walk In The Room de­buted on Jan­uary 4, 1964, and re­mained on that survey for six weeks. On the Bill­board Hot 100, the record en­tered the survey on Jan­uary 25 and was gone the next week!

4   As for that 12-string guitar, Searcher Frank Allen said, “I think everyone knows by now that what they thought was a jan­gling 12-string guitar on Nee­dles And Pins was, in fact, the very in­triguing res­o­nance of two 6-string in­stru­ments cre­ated al­most ac­ci­den­tally in the mix.” The gui­tars on these records were heard by the Bea­tles and when George Har­rison ex­pressed an in­terest in the in­stru­ment, the man­u­fac­turers of Rick­en­backer gui­tars pre­sented him with the second copy of their new elec­tric 360/12 edi­tion. George put it to mar­velous use on the Fab Four’s next single A Hard Day’s Night and the album of the same name that followed.

5   In most of the pop music world, the Searchers’ two hit records prob­ably did more to make Jackie DeShannon’s name known than all of her own records up to that point com­bined! Ex­cept, of course, for Canada.

6   Jackie ac­tu­ally did find her way into three movies: Surf Party star­ring everybody’s fa­vorite surfer, Bobby Vinton (filmed in 1963), and C’mon, Let’s Live A Little with Bobby Vee (1966); and the little-known In­ti­macy (1966). Also known as The De­ceivers, it is a noir-ish drama where Jackie plays a prostitute!

7   Prior to Jackie’s per­for­mance, the show’s host Sam Riddle re­lated that when Jackie had toured with the Bea­tles the pre­vious year, she had com­pli­mented John Lennon on his groovy shirt. The next day, the shirt ar­rived at her dressing room as a gift from the Beatle. Jackie had it al­tered to fit her and was wearing it that day for the taping.

8   My first memory of it came years later when I bought the BREAKIN’ IT UP ON THE BEATLES TOUR album from Bleecker Bob in 1977, paying a whop­ping $25 for a stereo copy!

9   Jackie’s ver­sion has an old-timey sound/feel and prob­ably couldn’t have been a hit any­where in the world after WWII.