Girl Of Yesterday Acoustic Folk Demos

Description

"Love Forever," our 2025 compilation of demos from Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon, won the hearts of collectors worldwide with its introspective, folk-rock-tinged tracks drawn from her unreleased recordings for Metric Music Publishing. Today, we surpass our previous successes with "Girl of Yesterday - Acoustic Folk Demos," a collection of UNRELEASED acoustic folk demos from Jackie, drawn from the same inexhaustible source. Folk music was a natural fit for Jackie. As a child in her native Kentucky, she sang gospel at home and in church, then as a teenager, country songs on her own weekly radio show. Her self-titled debut album, released on Liberty in 1963, was entirely composed of folk tracks. But that album only featured covers of folk songs written by other artists. The album "Girl of Yesterday - Acoustic Folk Demos," on the other hand, presents a dozen tracks, all written by Jackie for an album distributed by Metric in 1964. Accompanied only by her masterfully fingerpicked acoustic guitar, DeShannon delivers a striking set of poignant and haunting songs, imbued with the doubt, confusion, and excitement of the search for an adult identity. Though rooted in acoustic folk, this album foreshadows folk-rock and the singer-songwriter era with its lyrical maturity and melodic complexity. Only 500 to 1000 copies were pressed in November 1964, its distribution limited to A&R directors and other music industry professionals tasked with choosing artists to record. Thanks to "Girl of Yesterday - Acoustic Folk Demos," these remarkable tracks finally receive the recognition they deserve. Among the standout tracks are a few songs that were quickly covered by famous artists. The most famous is undoubtedly "Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe," driven by a Bo Diddley beat and performed by the Byrds (Jackie was a big fan of the band) on their debut album, Mr. Tambourine Man, a Top 10 hit in 1965. On the original Metric Music demo, the track was titled "It's Gonna Be All Right," in a much more folk style. Marianne Faithfull, meanwhile, covered the beautiful and bittersweet "With You in Mind" on her 1967 album Love in a Mist. Also featured is the first version of "Splendor in the Grass," which would become a DeShannon single in 1966, with the Byrds accompanying. Richie Unterberger's liner notes offer heartfelt memories from Jackie about the motivations behind these songs and the vibrant mid-60s Los Angeles scene from which they emerged. Remastered by Mike Milchner at Sonic Vision and enhanced with photos from Jackie's private collection, Girl of Yesterday - Acoustic Folk Demos is available on beige vinyl or CD. An unreleased and utterly charming chapter in Jackie's evolution and the progression of American folk and pop toward more sophisticated forms.