MUSIC
Brenda Lee, the veteran singer who knocked Mariah Carey off the Christmas top spot
After turning 79 this week, the Atlanta-born singer has become the oldest artist to reach No.1 in the US with a reissue of her biggest hit.
Her last studio album was released in 2007 and for the past two decades she has rarely performed live but Brenda Lee has shot straight back to the top of the charts in the United States with an old festive favorite - 65 years after she recorded it. Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree has kept Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You off top spot in the Hot 100 for the past two weeks.
One afternoon in late 1958 at Owen Bradley’s Film and Recording Studio in Nashville, Lee took just three takes to put down a rousing rockabilly rendition of Johnny Marks’ immortal Yuletide composition.
At the time, Lee was just 13 years old but already had four years’ experience in the industry under her belt, recording as Little Brenda Lee since she was nine. In fact Rockin’ wasn’t even her first stab at a Christmas hit - she had recorded Frankie Adams and Wilbur Jones’ I’m Gonna Lasso Santa Claus a couple years earlier, before the Billboard Hot 100 was launched.
Rockin’ flies under the radar
Follow-up singles Jambalaya and Rock-a-Bye Baby Blues failed to chart and Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree didn’t do much better on its original release, in November 1958 in the United States and a few weeks later in the UK, barely selling 5,000 copies worldwide. As she herself recalled, “It was played but nobody went crazy over it”.
It hit No.7 in the UK when it was reissued by Brunswick in 1962 while Elvis Presley’s Return To Sender flew straight in at No.1. It wasn’t until 1990 that Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ re-emerged as an unlikely Christmas classic thanks to its inclusion on a movie soundtrack. For many, it was already in the collective subconscious after Kim Wilde and Mel Smith had re-recorded a version for Comic Relief three years earlier.
Revisted in ‘Home Alone’
“Johnny Marks was wonderful. He wrote all the great Christmas standards, and I’ll never forget, I was sitting at home when the phone rang. It was one of my friends and she said, ‘Brenda, did you know that your song is all over the movie Home Alone?’ That was the catalyst for the song”.
During her career Brenda Lee recorded 29 studio albums, had three number one hits and saw 48 of her singles enter the Hot 100. Rockin’ has not moved out of the top 3 in the Billboard’s holiday charts since it was established in 2011.
John Lennon, a fan
Rockin’ has spent a fortnight at No.1 and looks like it will stay there to top the charts this Christmas - just when two other artists who have had Xmas hits of their own have been in the news - Shane MacGowan and John Lennon.
The Beatles, and John Lennon in particular, were big fans. The pre-fame Fabs were on the same bill as Lee at the Star Club in Hamburg’s seedy red light district in April 1962, as she recalled to The Guardian: “I was standing there while waiting to go on and listening to these songs I’d never heard before. When they came off, I asked John Lennon, ‘Where do you get those songs?’ And he said very nonchalantly: ‘Oh, we write them.’ I was flabbergasted and asked if they had a tape I could take to my record company. Of course they turned them down”.
Lennon would belt out her UK releases Fool #1 and Weep No More My Baby at the Cavern and around Liverpool’s dancehalls when the group was first starting out.
Close to a billion streams
As for Rockin’, Lee, who turned 79 on Monday, cannot believe how it has taken off - it has gone x5 platinum with over 5 million sales in the US and 2.5 million everywhere else. The 1958 original has clocked almost 900 million streams on Spotify. As she told Bobby Bones recently, “I never thought that that would be my signature song. And everyone, if they remembered me, would hear that and say, ‘Yeah, that was her song’”.