SUCH BIG
ATTRACTION, CHAIN REACTION THINGS
The song is hot. Each time her voice finds that sandpaper
roughness, your sinking heart pulls you in.
Each time the song comes on, you blush, a little flustered.
Naturally, you google her. And it turns out she’s twelve.
By that age Brenda Lee was a regular on Red
Foley’s Ozark Jubilee. Her
network debut came two years earlier, the year she changed her name at the
suggestion of a TV producer. She used to
be Brenda Tarpley. That year, her mother
lost the Tarpley too, remarried two years after Brenda’s father’s accidental
death at work. Her Dad’s dying had left
Brenda to be breadwinner, singing for money at local events and on the radio,
but it was nothing new. She was only two
when her mother and sister took her to a local candy store so she could stand
on the counter and sing for treats and change.
A ten-year veteran of showbiz at the age of
twelve, Brenda Lee is debuting “Dynamite”, her next big hit, which will remain
her biggest until the pouty teen queen classic, “I’m Sorry”. It is one year before she will record a song
everyone knows, “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree”, at the age of thirteen. After this performance on the Jubilee,
in part due to it, Brenda Lee will come to be known as Little Miss Dynamite, so
this is footage of the birth of a nickname.
Red Foley’s cornfed introduction must have
stunned the production room, because the camera switches too late to what looks
to have been an exploding hat trick.
Brenda is confident and comfortable as she starts to perform, keeping
eyes with the camera and allowing her slight 4’9” frame to shoulder a bob in
rhythm to the song. Then something
happens, as another camera is cut to.
She stiffens. When she looks at
the camera, she looks downward or inward.
She keeps looking to her left, whether at the invisible backing band,
Red standing there with his plunged detonator, or whatever it is that is
distracting her, yet continues to belt out the song in that firecracker
voice—such a commanding sound from such an awkwardly near-motionless cherub of
a girl.
Either she is too young or TV is too young
for her to remember to keep her eyes within the boundaries set by the camera’s
lens, but she lands the song like a true entertainer, and delivers a thank you
that is all lambs and daisies sweet. She
has that innocence, that something fresh and new, the draw of the child star. The reason Brenda Lee was a well-loved
regular on the Ozark Jubilee, the reason child talent always sells, is
because of the joy that comes with witnessing innocence at the door of a bright
future, witnessing promise. But don’t
forget that this girl is a professional.
She has lugged her star up each new wrung of the ladder for ten
years.
You never know how much of anything is just
a put on, and so it doesn’t even matter.
When her vocal chords quake the way they do, it is the sound of
innocence being lost, and there’s a thrill in it. That’s the act, the angle, the show she’s
been working on for a decade, well-rehearsed innocence a necessary
fabrication. Maybe beneath placid
surfaces and puffy bow dresses are thoughts, feelings, contradictions and
confusions colliding, tingling the skin trying to push a way out. At twelve, there is no way to digest these
emotions or the words to let them out, but sing a song a certain way and out it
pours—to be heard, then felt. Or felt
before it is even heard, like an explosion.
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