Jackie DeShannon: Everyone listens when she walks in the room

Even if “When You Walk In The Room” — a song about a young woman who suddenly finds herself in the presence of the young man she has crush on — isn’t Jackie DeShannon’s biggest hit, it’s one of her great songs.

Released in December 1963, “When You Walk In The Room” opens with a jangling guitar lick and a thump and rattle of percussion that evoke a quickening heartbeat.

“I can feel a new expression on my face,” the husky-toned DeShannon sings. “I can feel a glowing sensation taking place. I can hear the guitars playing lovely tunes, every time that you walk in the room.”

DeShannon’s recordings of “What The World Needs Now Is Love” and “Put A Little Love In Your Heart” and Kim Carnes’ rendition of “Bette Davis Eyes,” a song co-written by DeShannon, are far better known than “When You Walk In The Room,” but she picked the latter song as title track for her new CD. Released this week, the disc re-imagines the singer-songwriter’s classic catalog.

“I didn’t want to go near the originals,” she explained last month. “We had great musicians on those records and you’ll never duplicate that. I want this record to be something that you listen to on the beach or any time of day. It’s low-key, like, ‘Hey, I’m dropping by your house. I have my acoustic guitar in the car. Would you like to hear a song?’ ”

DeShannon chose a spare production style even though its intimacy frightened her.

“It’s not like being in the studio with musicians and all kinds accoutrement,” she said. “This is just you and me.”

Recording new versions of the songs held surprises for DeShannon.

“It was an exhilarating experience,” she said. “And I was very emotional about it. The songs, especially because they’re done in such a personal way, became new songs to me. Something like ‘Breakaway,’ which I turned into a ballad, it shows you where you can go, if the song is there.”

Kentucky native DeShannon emerged as a rare female singer-songwriter in the late 1950s. Rock ’n’ roll pioneer Eddie Cochran encouraged the talented teen to move to California.

“Out here, I was one of the first women who was producing and writing and singing,” she said. “I produced great demos but, unfortunately, they wouldn’t let me produce my own things. Because I was a girl, that wasn’t gonna happen.”

As both a singer and songwriter, DeShannon often was disappointed in producers’ handling of her own recordings and recordings by other artists based upon her compositions and demos.

“Many times producers used voices that were not what I’d heard for the songs,” she recalled. “And many times I had to record material that I didn’t pick.”

She found a kindred creative spirit, however, in the late producer, arranger, composer and session musician Jack Nitzsche. He’d previously arranged many Phil Spector hits, including the Crystals’ “He’s A Rebel” and the Ronnettes “Be My Baby.”

“We were like soul brother and sister,” DeShannon said. “If I told Jack, ‘It’s more like Lightnin’ Hopkins,’ boom, he arranged exactly in that style. But so many arrangers were like, ‘What, huh?’ They didn’t have the historical knowledge Jack had.”

DeShannon-Nitzsche collaborations “When You Walk In The Room” and “Needles and Pins” are highlights of her 1964 album, Breakin’ It Up On The Beatles Tour!

“Doing that first Beatles tour of America was wild,” she said. “It doesn’t get bigger or better than that.”

Frenzied Beatles fans usually had no interest in the tour’s opening acts, but DeShannon loved her summer with the Fab Four anyway.

“To play in front of that many people was fantastic,” she said. “They booed us off the stage most of the time, but I was prepared for that. I did things like ‘Shout,’ up-tempo material. But some opening acts cried and quit. I reminded them that, ‘You see, 80,000 people did not come to see you.’ ”

Traveling with the Beatles, DeShannon added, “we had some pillow fights. George (Harrison) came back and sat down and said, ‘How does that ‘When You Walk In The Room’ lick go?’ And John (Lennon) was working on a song. He said, ‘What do you think of this?’ It happened to be ‘I’m A Loser.’ So it was a fantastic experience.”

DeShannon also knew Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley.

“Elvis was never high and mighty,” she said. “That comes through in the music. Forget that he was a great singer and performer, he was just a guy you wanted to hang out with.”

Only recently returning to writing songs, DeShannon included a new song, “Will You Stay In My Life,” as the final track on her new CD.

“You go through things,” she said. “My father was ill for a long time. I was kind of not with it. But I’m feeling much better now. I’m excited about the projects that I’m doing and I’m finding the fun in writing again. It’s like being in your mom’s basement and saying, ‘Wow, I really like this.’

“But there are so many songs that you work on and then don’t think about. It’s that muse that you have to depend on.”

Inspiration compelled DeShannon to write “When You Walk In The Room.”

“I was waiting for my date to pick me up,” she recalled. “He was late coming by my house. I was getting nervous because this was someone I liked a lot. The guitar happened to be sitting there and I picked it up and started writing that song. The person who I had in mind when I wrote the song does not know that I wrote it for him. It’s been a secret for many years.”

DeShannon’s new recording of “Room” reminds her of the “mystery thing” she hears in the songs of Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison.

“I felt their presence,” she said. “You don’t know where they’re going, but there’s always something really cool at the end. And the ending, ‘When you walk in the room, wo-a, wo-a, wo-a,’ it was like, ‘Wow, when you come in the room, that’s it.’ Because I’ve always believed that if you have a person in your life, that’s the most important thing.”