My parents just moved to a new house recently, and as part of the house, got a big stack of records from the old lady who lived there. Most of these were 50s and 60s ephemera--Mitch Miller, Herb Albert, the Sal-Val-type selection--but among these were a few prizes--Johnny Cash, an early Beatles record, various strange and racy artifacts, but none so prizeworthy as Brenda Lee's 1967 past-her-prime album Here's Brenda. Now I knew very little about Brenda Lee before hearing this record, other than the fact that she sings two of my favorite Christmas songs, "Jingle Bell Rock" and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree", and much of what I have found of hers online and elsewhere pales in comparison to Here's Brenda, which is sadly out of print.
Lee was a prodigy of sorts who began performing rockabilly songs at the age of ten, and cut her first album in her early teens-country and rockabilly songs sung with a voice that sounds like a birdsong run through with sandpaper. Many of these early songs, at least ones I've heard, such as "Dynamite", are rather fiery and brazen for the day, and it seems she spent her early years somewhere between Patsy Cline and Wanda Jackson (whose song "fujiyama mama" is required listening). Then in the early sixties Lee became ensconced in the teen craze and spent the first half of the decade making hit after hit of bubblegum-sullen lovesick ballads, the success of which has seemed to swallow up her more varied legacy. Though much of this material is far harder to stomach than her beginnings, her voice makes even some of the more saccharine and melodramatic material seem somewhat convincing. Like many of the artists of the early sixties, Brenda was then pushed aside as the British Invasion hit, and it was during this downward slope into obscurity that she recorded Here's Brenda.

All of the songs on the album are covers, and I'm not sure if Lee ever wrote any of her songs, but she is one of those few artists that has a voice so distinctive that she can get away with a career of covers, plus that was the name of the game at the time. The material ranges from blues standards like "St. Louis Blues" to prototypical fifties schlopp like "Pennies from Heaven" and "Back in your own Backyard", and though most of this stuff should be painful to listen to for a tuned in indiephile like me, the arrangements and Lee's voice combine to create a vibrance and timelessness that make the songs unbelievably listenable- is this why they call this stuff easy listening? Songs like "Ballin' the Jack" (how's that for a title?) and "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (from Bessie Smith's repertoire) are raspy, belted out, ribald delights, and there are touches of burleque sax and bizarro-in-retrospect backup singers throughout the album- the kind of genuine weirdness that makes crate-digging worthwhile. The highlight, however, is the song "Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye", a standard about love leaving by train that here is rendered with such minimalist brilliance that it could serve as the foundation for Jack White's (or at least Spoon's) entire philosophy--the song is predominantly beat, handclaps, and Lee's inimitably lovely voice, joined by a near perfect sax solo about halfway through. And every time I hear her sing the line "if you don't get a letter then you know I'm in jail", I just smile and start the record over again. Seriously, this has been going on for like two months now. Have I lost it? Have I been possessed by someone's grandmother? Track the song down and let me know.

Chad Schell-McGaw