“The music business can be very cold. And it doesn’t honor its elders.” — Brenda Lee

It’s her birthday today.

Let’s start off by saying that Brenda Lee set chart records which weren’t broken for 20 years. Who broke Brenda Lee’s records? Madonna.

She is mainly known now for “I’m Sorry” (maybe?) but mostly “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, played on repeat every Christmastime (and charting. So she continues to make the charts: Let’s see if Madonna can say that into her twilight years. Brenda started off as a kid with a huge growly voice, kinda like Christina Aguilera, who had an adult belting sound when she was like 11 years old. Brenda Lee moved on to superstardom, selling millions and millions of records. And millions. She dominated the 1960s and her career was basically forgotten by the generation directly following. Still: she was on the heels of The Beatles – the freakin’ Beatles – in terms of how many records she sold. She beat the Beach Boys. She was huge.

Brenda Lee was one of those kid stars who supported her whole family before she was even in double digits. She got her start singing on the radio, covering country classics like “Jambalaya” in a massive growly voice, that’s almost funny because she was such a pipsqueak. What was she hearing, imitating? She had her OWN radio hour, again before she was even 10 years old. The fact that she didn’t flame out like so many child stars is amazing. She had a good attitude. Red Foley heard her sing, was blown away, and got her in front of the people at Decca. She was nine. It was the mid-late-50s and as is probably obvious she was associated mainly with country music, even though her voice had that RASP, a Wanda Jackson almost “ugly” rasp. She was extremely popular but her earliest stuff has a whiff of novelty act about it. She was barely over four feet tall (she was always a tiny woman), and she made a massive sound.

But she had powerful people behind her, and she performed on live TV and toured constantly, including in Europe. Rockabilly hit the United States like a bomb, or more like strafing machine gun fire, and she tried to segue, not successfully at first. She started off the 1960s with her first big hit – “Sweet Nothins”:

Listen to that sound. Listen to her voice. She’s 15 years old. In my opinion, that big sound is predicting what Phil Spector and the Beach Boys were going to be doing with walls of sound: it’s HUGE and her voice is big enough to power on over it.

It was a huge hit, and you can hear why.

Her next huge hit was a B-side called “I’m Sorry”. Nobody was expecting “I’m Sorry” to do much. It wasn’t the hit, or not supposed to be. But it exploded. Now the funny thing about this is: the lyrics are earnest and yearning, where a young girl – who didn’t know “love could be cruel” – begs for forgiveness. Forgiveness for being young, naive, for not knowing.

But the way she plays it makes me think …. this girl is not sorry at all. In fact, the song COULD be read as entirely sarcastic, or at the very least stiflingly passive-aggressive and it’s a much better interpretation, I think.

She had hit after hit in the ’60s and was just completely forgotten in about a decades’ time, although she kept on keeping on, and she always had her fan base, and she’s in the record books forever – it took 20 years for Madonna to take her pedestal – twenty years – and of course every holiday season you can hear her voice blasting over the airwaves, a 13-year-old girl wishing you a rockin’ Christmas from 70 years ago.

 
 
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