Art & Creativity Quote by Jackie DeShannon

DeShannon’s sentence is doing a quiet piece of credentialing: not the flashy kind that name-drops legends, but the lived-in kind that starts with geography and ends with genre. “Growing up in the south” isn’t just a biographical detail, it’s a shorthand for an ecosystem where music is social infrastructure. Gospel isn’t presented as a style she sampled; it’s the training ground. “Singing in the church” signals discipline, community approval, and the kind of vocal athleticism that comes from having to move a room, not just hit notes.

The interesting slip is the layering: gospel sits beside “rhythm and blues,” and then she clarifies, almost protectively, that “the blues background was my big inspiration.” That pivot reads like a preemptive answer to a question she’s been asked a hundred times: How does a white, female pop-rock songwriter credibly draw from Black-rooted forms without it feeling like costume? Her phrasing frames influence as proximity and immersion rather than extraction. It’s a way of saying: I didn’t discover this in a record store; it raised me.

Context matters. DeShannon came up in an era when the mainstream industry happily monetized R&B while policing who got to embody it. By grounding her sound in church and the South, she’s placing herself in the long American feedback loop where sacred and secular, Black and white markets, authenticity and commerce keep colliding. The subtext is less “I was inspired” than “my music has a lineage, and I’m naming it.”