Songs with the name Jackie

Scott Walker's "Jackie," from his late-sixties run of orchestral solo albums, is a chamber-drama of a song: striding strings, theatrical phrasing, a Jacques Brel-inflected story of a doomed young idealist, delivered with a baritone that turns melodrama into something genuinely moving. The name here belongs to a character in a tale, the way an old ballad uses one. A few years later, Van Morrison gave the name to a tribute: "Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile)" rides a bright horn riff and one of his most joyful vocals, a soul throwdown in praise of the singer who could make an audience weep just by lifting his voice.

The Ozark Mountain Daredevils took "Jackie Blue" into the top reaches of mid-seventies AM radio — a gentle, swaying track with a soft falsetto floating over acoustic guitar and a hazy, golden-hour feel. It sounds like the sweetest end of country-rock, and the Jackie of the title is a girl who dreams her life away, glimpsed rather than explained. John Mellencamp's "Jackie Brown," from 1987, works a harder vein: a rust-belt story-song about a man worn down by poverty and quiet desperation, sung over strummed acoustic guitar and the scrappy heartland-rock sound he made his own. The name belongs to the working man at the centre of it, and the song's sympathy is what stays with you.

Four records, four Jackies — a doomed romantic, a beloved singer, a daydreaming girl, a beaten-down man. Together they show how much a single name can carry in a song.