Episode 79: “Sweet Nothin’s” by Brenda Lee

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 79

Sweet Nothings by Brenda Lee

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 60s, 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 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 10 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.

Uh-huh, honey.

Alright.

He knows the things I like to hear.

Things he wouldn't tell.

Nobody else.

Secret baby, I keep him to myself.

Sweet nothing.

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-operate 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 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 any taller than four foot nine.

You can hear that when she was talking with Faircloth, she was as incoherent as any child would be.

And just like we told you, little Brenda Lee is here herself.

How are you today, Brenda?

Fine.

You got a mighty pretty dress on there.

Thank you.

Oh, did you iron that today?

No.

You didn't iron that?

It took you a week to iron that dress, wouldn't it?

All the ruffles and little pretty flowers on it.

That's real cute.

Your hair all fixed up and dolled up.

Would you go to the beauty shop and get that fixed up?

No, sir.

You didn't?

Is that natural?

That's your hair?

It's my hair, but it's not natural.

But when she sang on the show, she sounded a lot more professional than almost any child vocalist you'll ever hear.

Cause not I'm looking on a single mom, she had a meal.

We get a harp, they'll be jarring.

Burn of a butt, we'll have big fun on the bio.

Her big break actually came from not doing a show.

She was meant to be playing the Peach Blossom special one night, but she decided that rather than make the $30 she would make from that show, she would go along to see Red Foley perform.

Foley was one of the many country music stars who I came very close to including in the first year of this podcast.

He was one of the the principal architects of the Hillbilly Boogie style that led to the development of Rockabilly, and he was a particular favourite of both Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Elvis's first ever public performance was him singing one of Foley's songs, the ballad Old Shep.

But more typical of Foley's style was his big hit, Sugarfoot Rag.

up the middle with the shoe-fly four.

One foot, two foot, slew-foot, drag, swing your honey to the sugar-foot rag.

Dig a little jig, then a ziggin' a zag, and listen to the fiddle play the sugar-foot rag.

Foley had spent a few years in semi-retirement.

His wife had died by suicide a few years earlier, and he had reassessed his priorities a little as a result.

But he had recently been tempted back out onto the road as a result of his being offered a chance to host his own TV show, the Ozark Jubilee, which was one of the very first country music shows on television.

And the Ozark Jubilee put on tours, and one was coming to Georgia.

Peanut Faircloth, who worked with Brenda on her radio show, was the MC for that Ozark Jubilee show, and Brenda's parents persuaded Faircloth to let Brenda meet Foley in the hopes that meeting him would give Brenda's career a boost.

She not only got to meet Foley, but Faircloth managed to get her a spot on the show, singing Jambalaya.

Red Foley said of that performance many years later, I still get cold chills thinking about the first time I heard that voice.

One foot started patting rhythm as though though she was stamping 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 realise I'd forgotten to get off the stage.

There I stood, after twenty-six 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.

Foley got Brenda to send a demo tape to the producers of the Ozark Jubilee.

That's the tape we heard earlier of her radio show, which was saved in the Ozark Jubilee's archives, and Brenda immediately became a regular on the show.

Foley also got her signed to Decca, the same label he was on, and she went into the studio in Nashville with Owen Bradley, who we've seen before producing Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Johnny Burnett, and Wanda Jackson, though at this point Bradley was only the engineer and pianist on her sessions.

Paul Cohen was the producer.

Her first single was released in September 1956, under the name Little Brenda Lee, nine years old, though in fact she was almost twelve when it came out.

It was a version of Jambalaya, which was always her big showstopper on stage.

what you need.

Oh,

sound of a gun, we'll have a bigger fun

on the bio.

Trample like crawfish pan up illegumbo.

Cause naka for the sigma was your head of me.

Oh,

picketa heart, little fruit jar, and be gay.

Oh,

sound of a gun, we'll have a bigger fun on the bio.

Neither that nor her follow-up, a novelty Christmas record, were particularly successful, but they were promoted well enough to get her further national TV exposure.

It also got her a new manager, though in a way she'd never hoped for or wanted.

Her then-manager, Lou Black, got her a spot performing at the National Country DJs Convention in Nashville, where she sang Jambalaya, backed by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.

She went down a storm, but the next night Black died suddenly of a heart attack.

Dub Alberton, Red Foley's manager, was at the convention and took the opportunity to sign Brenda up immediately.

Alberton got her a lot of prestigious bookings.

For example, she became the youngest person ever to headline in Las Vegas on a bill that also included a version of the Ink Spots.

and she spent the next couple of years touring and making TV appearances.

As well as her regular performances on the Ozark Jubilee, she was also a frequent guest on the Steve Allen Show, and an occasional one on Perry Como's.

She was put on country package tours with George Jones and Patsy Klein, and on rock and roll tours with Danny and the Juniors, the Chantelles, and Ricky and Sylvia.

This was the start of a split in the way she was promoted that would last for many more years.

Alberton was friends with Colonel Tom Parker, and had a similar Carney background, right down to having, like Parker, run a scam where he put a live bird on a hot plate to make it look like it was dancing, though in his case he'd done it with a duck rather than a chicken.

Alberton had managed all sorts of acts.

His first attempt at breaking the music business was when in 1937 he'd helped promote Jesse Owens during Owens's brief attempt to become a jazz vocalist.

but he'd later worked with Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and Ernest Tubb before managing Foley.

Brenda rapidly became a big star, but one thing she couldn't do was get a hit record.

The song Dynamite gave her the nickname she'd be known by for the rest of her life, Little Miss Dynamite.

But it wasn't a hit.

And while her second attempt at a Christmas single, Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, didn't chart at all at the time, it's been a perennial hit over the decades since.

In fact, its highest position on the charts came in December 2019, 61 years after it was released, when it finally reached number two on the charts.

Rocking

Part of the problem at the beginning had been that she had clashed with Paul Cohen.

They often disagreed about what songs she should perform.

But Cohen eventually left her in the charge of Owen Bradley.

who would give her advice about material, but let her choose it herself.

While her records weren't having much success in the US, it was a different story in other countries.

Alberton tried, and largely succeeded, to make her a breakout star in countries other than the US, where there was less competition.

She headlined the Paris Olympia, appeared on Oh Boy in the UK,

and inspired the kind of riots in Brazil that normally didn't start to hit until Beatlemania some years later.

And to this day she still has a very substantial Latin American fan base as a result of Alberton's efforts.

But in the US her rockabilly records were unsuccessful, even as she was a massively popular performer live and on T V, so Bradley decided to take a different tack.

While she would continue making rock and roll singles, she was going to do an album of old standards from the nineteen twenties, to be titled Grandma, What Great Songs You Sang.

But that was no more successful, and it would be from the Rockabilly world that Brenda's first big hit would come.

Brenda Lee and Red Foley weren't the only acts that Dub Alberton managed.

In particular, he managed a rockabilly act named Ronnie Self.

Self recorded several Rockabilly classics, like Ain't I'm a Dog?

Ain't I'm a dog.

Well, I come in this morning, bout a half past three.

My good gal set you off and lead on on me.

I said, wait a minute, baby, let me get a few packs.

When you leave, you know you can't come back.

Oh, ain't I'm a dog.

Yeah, I ain't a my dog.

Ain't no dog.

Well, I ain't a my dog.

Ain't a mad dog.

Ain't I'm a dog.

Always stepping around.

Self's biggest success as a performer came with Boppalina, a song clearly intended to cash in on Be Boppalula, but ending up sounding more like Don and Dewey.

Astonishingly, this record, which some have called the first punk record, was written by Webb Pierce and Mel Tillis, two of the most establishment country artists around.

doobie-dubby-lina, go gal, go, yeah.

That made the lower reaches of the Hot 100, but was Self's only hit as a performer.

While Self was talented, he was also unstable.

As a child, he had once cut down a tree to block the road, so the school bus couldn't get to his house, and on another occasion, he had attacked one of his teachers with a baseball bat, and that was before he started the boozing and the amphetamines.

In later years, he did things like blast away an entire shelf of his demos with a shotgun.

get into his car and chase people trying to knock them down, and set fire to all his gold records outside his publisher's office, after he tried to play one of them on his record player, and discovered it wouldn't play.

Nobody was very surprised when he died in 1981, aged only 43.

But while Self was unsuccessful and unstable, Albritton saw something in him and kept trying to find ways to build his career up.

And after Self's performing career seemed to go absolutely nowhere, he started pushing Self as a songwriter, and Self came up with the songs that would change Brenda Lee's career: Sweet Nothings.

Mama turned on the front porch lights.

Come in, daughter, that's

Sweet Nothings became a massive hit, reaching number four on the charts, both in the UK and the US, in early 1960.

After a decade of paying her dues, Brenda Lee was a massive rock and roll star at the ripe old age of 15.

But she was still living in a trailer park.

Because she was a miner, her money was held in trust to stop her being exploited, but rather too much was being kept back.

The court had only allowed her to receive $75 a week, which she was supporting her whole family on.

That was actually almost dead on the average wage for the time, but it was low enough that apparently there was a period of several weeks where her family were only eating potatoes.

Eventually, they petitioned the court to allow some of the money to be released, enough for her to buy a house for her family.

Meanwhile, as she was now a hit maker, she was starting to headline her own tours, all-star reviews, but there were fewer stars on them than the audience thought.

The Hollywood Argylles and Johnny Preston were both genuine stars, but some of the other acts were slightly more dubious.

She'd recently got her own backing band, the Casuals, who have often been called Nashville's first rock and roll roll band.

They'd had a few minor local hits that hadn't had much national success, like My Love Song for You.

This is my love song, oh darling, for you.

It proves that you

alone

They were led by Buzz Cayson, who would go on to a very long career in the music business, doing everything from singing on some Alvin and the Chipmunks records, to being a member of Ronnie and the Daytoners, to writing the massive hit Everlasting Love.

The British singer Gary Mills had released a song called Look for a Star that was starting to get some US airplay.

When life doesn't seem worth the living,

and you don't really care who you are,

when you feel there's no one beside you,

look for a star.

Kaysen had gone into the studio and recorded a sound-alike version under the name Gary Miles, chosen to be as similar to the original as possible.

His version made the top 20 and charted higher than the original.

When life doesn't seem worth a living,

and you don't really care who you are,

when you feel there is no one beside you

look for a star

when you know you're alone and so lonely,

and your friends have traveled.

So, on the tours, Gary Miles was a featured act too.

Kaysen would come out in a gold lame jacket with his hair slicked back and perform as Gary Miles.

Then he'd go off stage, brush his hair forward, take off the jacket, put on his glasses and come back as one of the casuals.

And then the casuals would back Brenda Lee after their own set.

As far as anybody knew, nobody in the audience seemed to realise that Gary Miles and Buzz Kaysen were the same person.

And at one point, two of the casuals, Kaysen and Richard Williams, had a minor hit with Hugh Jarrett of the Jordanaires as the statues with their version of Blue Velvet.

Softer than satin was the light

from her eyes.

She

will.

And so sometimes the statues would be on the bill, too.

But it wasn't the casuals who Brenda was using in the studio.

Instead, it was the group of musicians who became known as the core of the Nashville A-Team.

Bob Moore, Buddy Harmon, Ray Edenson, Hank Garland, Grady Martin, Floyd Kramer, and Boots Randolph.

Those session players played on every rock and roll or country record to come out of Nashville in the late 50s and early 60s, including most of Elvis's early 60s records, and country hits by Patsy Klein, Jim Reeves, George Jones, and others.

And so it was unsurprising that Brenda's biggest success came, not with rock and roll music, but with the style of country known as the Nashville Sound.

The Nashville Sound is a particular style of country music that was popular in the late 50s and early 60s, and Owen Bradley was one of the two producers who created it.

Chet Atkins was the other one.

And almost all of the records with that sound were played on by the A-team.

It was one of the many attempts over the years to merge country music with current pop music to try to make it more successful.

In this case, they got rid of the steel guitars, fiddles, and honky-tonk piano, and added in orchestral strings and vocal choruses.

The result was massively popular.

Chet Atkins was once asked what the Nashville sound was, and he put his hand in his pocket and jingled his change, but not generally loved by country music purists.

Vender Lee's first number one hit was a classic example of the Nashville sound, though it wasn't originally intended that that would be the hit.

To follow up Sweet Nothings, they released another up-tempo song, this time written by Jerry Reed, who would go on to write Guitar Man for Elvis, among others.

That went to number six in the charts, a perfectly successful follow-up to a number four hit record.

But as it turned out, the B-side did even better.

The B-side was another song written by Raleigh Self, a short song called I'm Sorry, which Owen Bradley thought little of.

He later said, I thought it kind of monotonous.

It was just, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, over and over.

But Frender liked it, and it was only going to be a B-side.

The song was far too short, so in the studio, they decided to have her recite the lyrics in the middle of the song, the way the Inkspots did.

sorry.

Please accept

my apology.

But

love is blind,

and I was too blind

to see.

Everyone concerned was astonished when that record overtook its a side on the the charts and went all the way to number one, even while That's All You Gotta Do was also in the top ten.

This established a formula for her records for the next few years.

One side would be a rock and roll song, while the other would be a ballad.

Both sides would chart, and in the US, usually the ballads would chart higher.

while in other countries it would tend to be the more up-tempo recordings that did better, which led to her getting a very different image in the US,

where she quickly became primarily known as an easy-listening pop singer, and had a Vegas show choreographed and directed by Judy Garland's choreographer, and in Europe, where for example she toured in 1962 on the same bill as Jean Vincent, billed as the King and Queen of Rock and Roll, performing largely rockabilly music.

Those European tours also led to the story which gets repeated most about Brenda Lee, and which she repeats herself at every opportunity, but which seems, as far as I can tell, to be completely untrue.

She regularly claims that after her UK tour with Vincent in 1962, they both went over to tour military bases in Germany, where they met up with Little Richard, and the three of them all went off to play the Star Club in Hamburg together.

where the support act was a young band called the Beatles, still with their drummer Pete Best.

She says she tried to get her record label interested in them, but they wouldn't listen, and they regretted it a couple of years later.

Now, Brenda Lee did play the Star Club at some point in 1962, and I haven't been able to find the date she played it, but the story as she tells it is full of holes.

The tour she did with Gene Vincent ended in mid-April.

around the same time that the Beatles started playing the Star Club.

So far so good.

But then Vincent did another UK tour and didn't head to Germany until the end of May.

He performed on the same bill as the Beatles on their last three nights there.

By that time Lee was back in the USA.

She recorded her hit, It Started All Over Again, in Nashville on May the 18th.

Whoop-ho, I love you all over again.

I thought that I could ignore you, but I last night I looked up and saw you, and I thought

hope you started all over again.

Little Richard, meanwhile, did play the Star Club at the Beatles, but not until November, and he didn't even start performing rock and roll again until October.

Vrender Lee is not mentioned in in Mark Lewison's utterly exhaustive books on the Beatles, except in passing.

Paul McCartney would sometimes sing her hit Fool Number One on stage with the Beatles, and he went to see her on the Gene Vincent show when they played Birkenhead, because he was a fan of hers.

And if Lewison doesn't mention something in his books, it didn't happen.

I've tweeted at Lewison to see if he can confirm that she definitely didn't play on the same bill as them, but not had a response before recording this.

So Brenda Lee's most often told story, sadly, seems to be false.

The Beatles don't seem to have supported her at the Star Club.

Over the next few years, she continued to rack up hits both at home and abroad, but in the latter half of the 60s, the hits started to dry up.

Her last top-twenty pop hit in the US, other than seasonal reissues of Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, was in 1966.

But in the 70s, she reinvented herself, without changing her style much, by marketing to the country market.

And between 1973 and 1980, she had nine country top ten hits, plus many more in the country top 40.

She was helped in this when her old school friend Rita Coolidge married Chris Christopherson, who wrote her a comeback hit, Nobody Wins.

matter

who's right or wrong.

We've been hurting each other

for much too long,

and it's too late to try

to say

what might have been.

Her career went through another downturn in the 80s as fashions changed in country music like they had in pop and rock.

But she reinvented herself again as a country elder stateswoman, guesting with her old friends Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn on the closing track on KD Lang's first solo album, Shadowland.

While Lee has had the financial and personal ups and downs of everyone in the music business, she seems to be one of the few child stars who came through the experience happily.

She married the first person she ever dated, shortly after her 18th birthday, and they remain together to this day.

They celebrate their 57th anniversary this week.

She continues to perform occasionally, though not as often as she used to.

and she's not gone through any of the dramas with drink and drugs that killed so many of her contemporaries.

She seems, from what I can tell, to be genuinely content.

Her music continues to turn up in all sorts of odd ways.

Kanye West sampled Sweet Nothings in 2013 on his hit single Bound 2,

which I'm afraid I can't excerpt here, as the lyrics would jeopardise my iTunes Clean rating.

And as I mentioned at the start, she had Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree go to number two on the US charts just last December.

And at 75 years old, there's a good chance she has many more active years left in her.

I wish I could end all my episodes anything like as happily.

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