American Masters: "Brenda Lee: Rockin' Around" (Nashville PBS, TH Entertainment LLC, American Masters Pictures, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, December 16) my husband Charles had an early enough work call that he returned home in time to watch with me a quite fascinating hour-long PBS American Masters documentary on Brenda Lee. She was born Brenda Mae Tarpley on December 11, 1944 in Atlanta (in the charity ward of Grady Hospital, which will give you an idea of how much – or little – money her parents, Ruben Tarpley and Annie Yarbrough Grayce had to raise her). When she was eight her dad, a construction worker, died in an industrial accident. Brenda had begun singing in her local church at age three (so she, like Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton, started out in church; it wasn’t just the great Black singers that did!) By age 10 she was already busking on the street and had become the family’s principal breadwinner. Having a similar sort of voice to Judy Garland’s – she was a girl but she sounded like an adult woman – she got on a local show called TV Ranch that was apparently the first country-music show ever aired on television. When her mom remarried and moved to Cincinnati, she got a job on a local radio show with host Jimmie Skinner. When her mother and stepfather moved back to Georgia – Augusta instead of Atlanta this time – she got a job on yet another local TV show called The Peach Blossom Special. Lee recalled that one night the show was scheduled to air on the night that Lee’s idol, Red Foley, was performing a live show at a local fairgrounds in 1955. She wanted to see him and maybe beg him for any help in getting her own career started. “I still get cold chills thinking about the first time I heard that voice,” Foley said. “One foot started patting rhythm as though she was stomping out a prairie fire but not another muscle in that little body even as much as twitched. And when she did that trick of breaking her voice, it jarred me out of my trance enough to realize I’d forgotten to get off the stage. There I stood, after 26 years of supposedly learning how to conduct myself in front of an audience, with my mouth open two miles wide and a glassy stare in my eyes.”

She sang on March 31, 1955 on the Ozark Jubilee show on local television, and a year later producer Owen Bradley – who also launched the careers of Patsy Cline (whom Lee knew and credited with helping her start her career) and Loretta Lynn – signed her to Decca Records. Her first two singles didn’t go anywhere, but in 1957 she recorded a song called “One Step at a Time” that became a hit in both the country and pop charts. Her next record, “Dynamite,” was also a hit and earned her the nickname “Little Miss Dynamite.” In 1958, at age 13, Lee recorded what remains her best-known record, the holiday novelty “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” written by Johnny Marks, the composer of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Marks said he wanted another Christmas-themed hit and got it when he fell asleep outdoors and woke up to notice pine trees swaying in a windstorm in front of him. Oddly, though this documentary was called Brenda Lee: Rockin’ Around, that song isn’t mentioned until just 10 minutes before the show ends. The main point producer/director Barbara Hall seemed to be making is that Brenda Lee was actually a wide-ranging artist whose music encompassed country, rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, rockabilly, pop, torch and just about every form of popular music available to a young woman in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. In 1960 she recorded “I’m Sorry,” which became her biggest hit even though Owen Bradley worried about whether a 15-year-old would be credible singing a song about heartbreak and originally relegated it to the “B”-side of her record. It also mentioned that Lee’s popularity was international; in 1962 she appeared at the Star Club in Hamburg where The Beatles were her opening act (though she mis-remembered their name at the time: she referred to them as “The Silver Beatles” but they had dropped “Silver” from their name two years earlier) and she said she especially got along with John Lennon.

Lee had hits in Britain even on songs the U.S. branch of her record company didn’t release as singles, and on one song, about a love affair between an American and a Japanese, she learned enough Japanese phonetically to sing one chorus of the lyrics – and was rewarded with a major hit in Japan. When the styles of American pop music changed in the 1960’s (ironically, largely as a result of The Beatles, her opening act in Hamburg in 1962), Lee switched her focus and targeted the country market. Lee continued to record until 2007, when she made her last album – a gospel record (returning to her roots in the church?) called Gospel Duets with Treasured Friends (the “friends” included Dolly Parton, George Jones, Alison Krauss, Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, Pam Tillis, Kix Brooks of Brooks and Dunn, Charlie Daniels, Martina McBride, Ronnie Dunn and Huey Lewis). Afterwards she stepped back from performing but continued to be active in music as a staff member for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. Brenda Lee is the ultimate disconfirmation of my long-held theory that the only way a child star could have a successful and happy adulthood is if they get away from show business altogether, as Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin did. She seems to have handled the ups and downs of her career just fine, and I loved that she said the reason she avoided alcohol and drugs was “I was worried that I would like them” (which is also true of me!). Though the only songs of hers I know well are “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and “I’m Sorry,” I have a lot of admiration for her as an artist and a person – and I love the fact that in 2024 she became the oldest woman to top the music charts when “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” was re-reissued and became even more popular than its big successor as a pop Christmas anthem, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”