WORDS BY JULIE BURNS
You have to feel massive sympathy for Sharon Sheeley. In April 1960, shortly after her 20th birthday and far from home in a foreign land, her dream trip turned nightmare. In a road accident that should never have happened, she lost her beloved fiancé Eddie Cochran. In a critical condition, she was left, in common with the other crash survivor Gene Vincent, with painful injuries. Thankfully, after a period of hospitalisation, she returned to America to try to rebuild her life.
Well before she was known as Cochran’s girlfriend, Sharon, aged 18, was the youngest woman ever to write an American No.1 hit. Before rock’n’roll, female songwriters were virtually unheard of, or not taken seriously. Even in the case of her first two-millionseller hit, Ricky Nelson’s Poor Little Fool, Sharon felt it necessary to ‘con’ Ricky into thinking her godfather had written it, and that Elvis was considering recording it on his return from the army. It did the trick. She was now on her way to a successful songwriting career that would encompass Eddie Cochran, and go on to a fruitful collaboration with Jackie DeShannon. The Sheeley-DeShannon pairing subsequently became one of the first and most successful female songwriting partnerships.