Little Brenda: a big (and long-lasting) star

In the old days, there were familiar routes to power. It helped to be older … and bigger … and male.
Brenda Lee was none of these. She signed her first record deal at 11; years later, she still didn’t fit the image of a teen pop star.
“I was singing all these unrequited-love songs,” Lee, who turned 80 on Dec. 11, says on “American Masters,” at 10 p.m. Monday (Dec. 16) on PBS, “and I’d never had a date …. I was 4-foot-9.”
But in the recording studio, she stood tall. She helped decide what songs to sing and how to sing them. The results were impressive.
She was “one of the biggest pop stars of the early ‘60s,” Richie Unterberger wrote in All Music Guide to Country (Backbeat Books, 2003), singing “not just the pop ballads that were her biggest hits, but straight country and some surprisingly fierce rockabilly.”
She hit No. 1 with “I’m Sorry.” Her “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” came out in 1958 … and became No. 1, 65 years later.
Lee grew up near Atlanta, encased in country music, including her mother singing to her at bedtime. “Later in life, I learned that those … were songs by Hank Williams,” she said in Country Music (Knopf, 2019), which Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns wrote as a companion book to their series. “So I was a huge Hank Williams fan, before I even knew who he was.”
She was soon a professional of sorts, Duncan and Burns wrote. “By the time she was 3 years old, she would stand on the wooden counter of the local grocery store and sing, while people dropped pennies and nickels at her feet.”
When she was 7, her dad died. Her mom did 16-hour shifts at the cotton mill … until Lee quickly became the breadwinner, singing on local radio stations.
But she turned down one radio job, so she could see a touring version of “Ozark Jubilee.” A disc jockey there introduced her to Red Foley; she sang for him … then did “Jambalaya” during the show … then began regular gigs on the “Jubilee,” each involving a 1,600-mile round trip with her mother.
The exposure worked. At 11, she signed with Decca Records.
In other places, young singers were being told what to sing, how to sing, what to say, how to look. But Nashville had more of a play-it-by-ear feeling. At recording sessions, Unterberger wrote, Lee had “robust vocals and white-hot backing from the cream of Nashville’s session musicians.”
These were skilled people, Lee said in the “American Masters” film, who used “head arrangements,” with little written down.
“She was just amazing,” Bradley said in the Duncan/Burns book. “The energy and the things she was doing vocally, none of us had heard of.”
They were just eight bars into one recording, he said, when Lee paused. Asked what was wrong, she said, “Bass player missed a note.”
The songs soared, Liz Mechem and Chris Carroll wrote in “Legends of Country” (Dalmatian, 2007). Lee “could belt a tune like nobody’s business …. Even as she released her first record at age 12, she sounded old enough that her manager created a rumor that she was a 32-year-old midget.”
She piled up hits on the pop charts. “She soon became known as Little Miss Dynamite,” wrote the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Fireside, 2001). “By the time she was 21, she had cut 256 sides for Decca.”
Her first songs were raucous rockabilly. Then Johnny Marks visited.
“Marks took 25 new songs to Decca Records,” Ralph Emery wrote in “More Memories” (Berkley, 1993). Each was rejected except for one that was chosen “simply because it was a Christmas song written by Marks.”
He’d already scored with “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” Now “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” – Lee, backed by Nashville’s best – would sell 15 million records.
By the time she was 18, Lee had had 11 songs in the top 10. An early one reached No. 6; then people flipped it over and found “I’m Sorry.”
Bradley had worried that people wouldn’t accept a torch song from a 15-year-old. He held it for months, then put it on the B-side. It became a classic and Lee continued to sing grown-up lyrics.
“By age 16, she was sounding mature enough to be growling about her baby giving her that ‘special look’ in ‘Sweet Nothin’s.’” Mechem and Carroll wrote. “But sexy as it was, somehow her girlish lilt left listeners feeling happy and bouncy.”
Her own life lacked drama. She attended public schools, was a high school cheerleader and didn’t date. At 18, she spotted Ronnie Shacklett; he was, she says in the “American Masters” film, handsome and “6-foot-4 and he had a car.” They married six months later and have two daughters.
By 1962, her songs were on both the pop and adult contemporary charts. As the Beatles era took hold they became country.
She stayed the same, she told Duncan and Burns, but the categories changed:
“I didn’t know it was rockabilly. I’m just singing songs, singing them like I sang. And then, all of a sudden, I was rock. And then, all of a sudden, I was pop. Then, all of a sudden, I became country.”
Sam Lovullo, a TV producer, claimed his show sparked that. Lee “faded from the charts, and from sight until ‘Hee Haw’ brought her back,” he wrote in “Life in the Kornfield” (Berkley, 1996). That “was the key to re-establishing her career. Hers is one of the great comeback stories of country music.”
She did his show early in 1972 and had six country top-10 songs in the next two years. There were four more appearances and a few more hits.
Lee credits the next surge to “Home Alone” (1990), which featured “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” The movie and the song keep returning.
Along the way, people upgrade her early work. Those first Decca singles, Unterberger wrote, could be “the best pre-teen rock & roll performances this side of Michael Jackson.”