"What the World Needs Now is Love" by Jackie DeShannon (1965)

Dance song of the day - August 8, 2024

I can’t stay away from Burt Bacharach and Hal David songs. Some of them are little masterpieces.

Jackie DeShannon made one of those songs famous — our song of the day — but what you might not know is that she has a very distinguished career as a songwriter herself.

Song of the day

Jackie started her singing career performing on the radio at age six and she’s apparently still on the radio at age 83 (almost), getting news from her friends Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and reporting it on Breakfast with the Beatles. (She got to know the Beatles as a supporting act on their first U.S. tour in 1964.)

From the early sixties to the late seventies she put out an album or two almost every year. I suspect that most people, like me, remember her best for her two Top 10 hits in the sixties — Bacharach and David’s “What the World Needs Now is Love” and her own “Put a Little Love in Your Heart,” co-written with Jimmy Holiday and her brother Randy Myers, which reached #4 in the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969. That song would produce another Top 10 hit for Annie Lennox and Al Green (as a duet) in 1988.

What most people don’t know is that Jackie was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010. Here are some of her songs:

• “Bette Davis Eyes” (with Donna Weiss), a global #1 single for Kim Carnes and won the 1982 Grammies for Song of the Year and Record of the Year

• “When You Walk in the Room,” taken to #3 in the UK by The Searchers

• “Dream Boy” and “Don’t Turn Your Back on Me” with Jimmy Page

• “Come and Stay with Me,” Marianne Faithfull’s biggest hit (#4 in the UK) and also covered by Cher on her successful debut solo album All I Really Want to Do

• “Don’t Doubt Yourself Babe” for the Byrd’s debut album Mr. Tambourine Man

• songs co-written with Randy Newman, including “She Don't Understand Him Like I Do” and “Did He Call Today Mama?”.

“What the World Needs Now is Love” shows what a brilliant song interpreter she was as well. Bacharach and David did not expect the song to be successful, given that its subtext was rejection of the escalating Vietnam War, and also given that Dionne Warwick and Gene Pitney had already passed on it.

But Jackie imbued it with a warm-hearted certainty that God would listen and respond to her plea for the world to have more “sweet love” rather than another river to cross or mountain to climb. (Hal David struggled for two years to come up with these timeless lyrics, and I think hit the proverbial bull’s eye.)

And, of course, Jackie was helped by Bacharach’s signature sound, perfect arrangement, and mastery at making the heart surge and the spirit soar. Here’s the magic that happened when a misfit song found its home with the right singer:

Song credits

Songwriters - Burt Bacharach and Hal David

Producer, arranger, conductor - Burt Bacharach

[Note: I can’t find credits for the studio musicians or engineer.]