Episode seventy-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Sweet Nothin's" by Brenda Lee, and at the career of a performer who started in the 1940s and who was most recently in the top ten only four months ago. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "16 Candles" by the Crests.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/



Errata: I say that the A-Team played on “every” rock and roll or country record out of Nashville. This is obviously an exaggeration. It was just an awful lot of the most successful ones.

It has also been pointed out to me that the version of "Dynamite" I use in the podcast is actually a later remake by Lee. This is one of the perennial problems with material from this period -- artists would often remake their hits, sticking as closely as possible to the original, and these remakes often get mislabelled on compilation CDs. My apologies.

Resources

As always, I've put together a Mixcloud playlist of all the songs excerpted in the episode.

Most of the information in here comes from Brenda Lee's autobiography, Little Miss Dynamite, though as with every time I rely on an autobiography I've had to check the facts in dozens of other places.

And there are many decent, cheap, compilations of Lee's music. This one is as good as any.

Patreon

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Transcript

A couple of months ago, we looked in some detail at the career of Wanda Jackson, and in the second of those episodes we talked about how her career paralleled that of Brenda Lee, but didn't go into much detail about why Lee was important.

But Brenda Lee was the biggest solo female star of the sixties, even though her music has largely been ignored by later generations. According to Joel Whitburn, she was the fourth most successful artist in terms of the American singles charts in that whole decade -- just behind the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles, and just ahead of the Supremes and the Beach Boys, in that order.

Despite the fact that she's almost completely overlooked now, she was a massively important performer -- while membership of the "hall of fame" doesn't mean much in itself, it does say something that so far she is the *only* solo female performer to make both the rock and roll and country music halls of fame. And she's the only performer we've dealt with so far to have a US top ten hit in the last year. So today we're going to have a look at the career of the girl who was known as "Little Miss Dynamite":

[Excerpt: Brenda Lee, "Sweet Nothin's"]

Lee's music career started before she was even in school. She started performing when she was five, and by the time she was six she was a professional performer. So by the time she first came to a wider audience, aged ten, she was already a seasoned professional. Her father died when she was very young, and she very quickly became the sole breadwinner of the household. She changed her name from Brenda Tarpley to the catchier Brenda Lee, she started performing on the Peach Blossom Special, a local sub-Opry country radio show, and she got her own radio show. Not only that, her stepfather opened the Brenda Lee Record Shop, where she would broadcast her show every Saturday -- a lot of DJs and musicians performed their shows in record shop windows at that time, as a way of drawing crowds into the shops. All of this was before she turned eleven.

One small piece of that radio show still exists on tape -- some interaction between her and her co-host Peanut Faircloth, who was the MC and guitar player for the show -- and who fit well with Brenda, as he was four foot eight, and Brenda never grew an