The 1960s File Feature
Put A Little Love In Your Heart
The Making and Rise of "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" Jackie DeShannon co-wrote "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" with her brother Randy Myers and fellow …
01 The Story
The Making and Rise of "Put a Little Love in Your Heart"
Jackie DeShannon co-wrote "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" with her brother Randy Myers and fellow songwriter Jimmy Holiday, crafting one of the most enduring pop anthems of the late 1960s. The song was recorded and released in 1969 on Imperial Records, a label that had already helped establish DeShannon as a credible singer-songwriter in an era when that designation carried genuine weight for a woman in pop music. DeShannon had been a fixture on the Los Angeles session scene throughout the decade, contributing songs to other artists and building her reputation as a formidable compositional talent before this record helped cement her identity as a performer in her own right.
The recording was produced by Jimmy Holiday and Randy Myers, and it carries the hallmarks of late-1960s West Coast pop: a warm horn arrangement, a gospel-inflected vocal delivery, and a melody constructed with broad, hymn-like intervals that invite communal singing. The production team understood that DeShannon's voice worked best when given room to breathe, and the arrangement was built around her rather than layered over her, giving the track an intimacy that cut through radio noise.
The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 28, 1969, entering at number 85. Its chart climb was steady and deliberate, a week-by-week ascent that reflected genuine radio traction rather than a promotional spike. By the end of July it had climbed into the top 50, and it continued upward through August. The song peaked at number 4 on August 30, 1969, spending 14 weeks on the chart in total. That peak placed it among the biggest hits of that summer, competing with recordings that had significantly larger promotional budgets and major-label infrastructure behind them.
The song arrived during a period of acute social tension in the United States. The Vietnam War was escalating, civil rights legislation was still fresh in the cultural memory, and the broader counterculture had begun fragmenting after the optimism of 1967. Against that backdrop, a song calling for collective empathy had a specific cultural resonance that pure entertainment could not manufacture. Radio programmers recognized this, and the record received broad airplay across formats that did not always agree on what belonged on their playlists.
DeShannon had earlier in the decade toured the United Kingdom with the Beatles, an experience that sharpened her sense of commercial melody and gave her direct exposure to the craft-consciousness of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership. That influence is traceable in "Put a Little Love in Your Heart," particularly in the song's reliance on a repeating title phrase that functions simultaneously as a melodic hook and a thematic declaration. The verse structure builds methodically toward that phrase, ensuring it lands with accumulated emotional weight each time it appears.
The song charted on the Adult Contemporary chart as well, reflecting its cross-demographic appeal. It was not simply a youth-market record; it spoke to a broader constituency of listeners who wanted pop music to carry a positive social message without abandoning the formal requirements of a well-constructed song. This dual appeal helped sustain its radio life beyond the initial promotional window.
After its initial success, "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" entered the canon of holiday and feel-good pop through a 1988 recording by Annie Lennox and Al Green for the film "Scrooged," which introduced the song to a new generation and demonstrated its melodic durability across two decades of changing pop aesthetics. That version reached number 9 in the United Kingdom and reinforced the original's status as a standard rather than merely a period piece. DeShannon's original recording, however, remains the definitive statement of the song, capturing a specific moment when the appeal to collective goodwill felt both urgent and genuinely possible.
Jackie DeShannon is also remembered as a co-writer of "Bette Davis Eyes," which became a massive hit for Kim Carnes in 1981, further demonstrating the longevity and range of her compositional output. "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" sits alongside that song as evidence of a writer who consistently understood how to build a melody around a central emotional idea and let that idea do the structural work.
02 Song Meaning
The Message at the Heart of "Put a Little Love in Your Heart"
"Put a Little Love in Your Heart" operates as a direct moral appeal, structured around a simple premise: that individual acts of compassion, practiced consistently, can alter the quality of collective life. Jackie DeShannon, writing with Jimmy Holiday and Randy Myers, did not approach this theme with irony or ambiguity. The song is an argument, not a question, and its confidence in that argument is part of what gives it its persuasive force.
The title phrase functions as both imperative and invitation. It tells the listener what to do while simultaneously modeling the warmth it advocates. This self-referential quality, the idea that the song itself is an act of the very thing it recommends, gives "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" a rhetorical coherence that distinguishes it from more generic uplift anthems of the period. The song is not merely describing a desirable state of affairs; it is attempting to produce one through the act of being heard.
The lyrical movement of the song begins with the individual, specifically with the relationship between the singer and a single other person, before expanding outward to encompass the wider world. This expansion follows a recognizable moral logic: change begins with the proximate and radiates outward. The personal and the political are treated not as separate domains but as continuous scales of the same human capacity. If you can extend care to one person, the song implies, then extending it further is not a categorical leap but a matter of practice and will.
The 1969 release context gives the song's message an additional layer of urgency. Written and recorded during a period of significant social division in the United States, it offered a counter-narrative to the polarization visible in nightly news coverage. Rather than engaging with specific political controversies, it located the problem at the level of individual disposition and proposed a remedy within each listener's immediate reach. This approach was strategic as well as sincere; it ensured the song could speak to audiences across political lines without requiring ideological alignment.
The gospel-inflected vocal style DeShannon brings to the recording reinforces the song's ethical register. Gospel music has historically functioned as both spiritual practice and community-building tool, and by drawing on its sonic vocabulary, DeShannon situates "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" within that tradition without making the reference explicit. Listeners attuned to that lineage would recognize the call-and-response logic embedded in the melody; listeners unfamiliar with it would simply feel the warmth of the delivery without needing the cultural context to receive its emotional content.
The song's endurance across decades, including its prominent reappearance via Annie Lennox and Al Green in 1988, suggests that its core argument has not become dated. Each generation finds in it a recognizable diagnosis of a recurring human failure, namely the tendency to withhold empathy under conditions of stress or division, and a remedy that requires no particular ideology or institutional framework. That simplicity is not naivety; it is precision. The song identifies the smallest possible unit of social change and focuses its entire energy on that point.
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