Review: Brenda Lee - Sincerely, Brenda Lee (1962)
Tracks: 1) You Always Hurt The One You Love; 2) Lazy River; 3) You’ve Got Me Crying Again; 4) It’s The Talk Of The Town; 5) Send Me Some Lovin’; 6) How Deep Is The Ocean (How High Is The Sky); 7) I’ll Always Be In Love With You; 8) I Miss You So; 9) Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear To Tread); 10) Only You (And Only Me); 11) Hold Me; 12) I’ll Be Seeing You.
REVIEW
You’d think that with all the «twist» craze going on, a sensible decision would have been to goad Brenda into once again brushing off her rock’n’roll singing skills — if not the old primal growl of ‘Dynamite’, then at least the merry chirp of all those Ray Charles and Fats Domino covers — but whether it was dictated by fat guys with cigars or by Brenda herself, an entirely different decision was made: with the singer rapidly approaching her 18th birthday, she was to project a more «wholesome» and «mature» image for the public. This meant staying away from any whiffs of the devil’s music whatsoever, concentrating exclusively on old-fashioned pop and country material — ironically, much the same marketing strategy as would be followed by Jerry Lee Lewis around the same time, though, to the best of my knowledge, Brenda Lee neither married any of her underage cousins nor would get married to anybody as his own underage cousin. (Instead, she would marry Ronnie Shacklett in April 1963, and as of 2024, they are still together after six decades of family life — which, arguably, might be Brenda’s single most amazing achievement in the fickle world of pop entertainment).
Normally, I would just say that an LP consisting of twelve slowly paced, similarly-sounding, identically arranged Nashville country-pop numbers is a concept unbearable in theory and unlistenable in practice — especially if most of these songs go back to the 1930s and 1940s (I think the cover of the Platters’ ‘Only You’, from 1954, is the most recent tune on here). And specifically in the case of Brenda Lee, one of the two best female rock’n’roll singers of the 1950s, the decision to retreat fully into the «safe» waters of country-pop — taken almost simultaneously with Wanda Jackson, for that matter — is a sad page in the evolution history of the American popular music scene. Obviously, it was wrong, misguided, and resulting in a state of cultural irrelevancy for the artist, particularly when two years later rock’n’roll would be reborn on an entirely different and far more spectacular level.
But today, now that rock’n’roll is dead once more and has turned into the same museum piece as classical and jazz music, we are revisiting and re-evaluating the old records on a grander scale — twenty years ago I would have written an album like Sincerely off after one listen; these days, I give it a few more and find out that I like it, because it is easier for me to assess it not just in the context of 1962, but in the context of the growth and evolution of Brenda Lee as an artist. The thing is, I feel no deep love for Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, or Tammy Wynette, «poster girls» as they are for canonical country values. Yet there is something intangibly non-canonical about Brenda Lee singing country/pop material, at least on a few of those early albums, and I do believe that by the time she hit her late teens, she’d matured into one of the most expressive young singers of her generation. Even if her «Little Miss Dynamite» stage was over and done, it left an unwipable impression.
If you take a moldy standard like ‘You Always Hurt The One You Love’ (first release by The Mills Brothers in 1944) and run it through several prior versions by such accomplished singers as Connie Francis or Kay Starr, it always sounds adult — and rather predictably so — but Brenda, at this point, still hovered somewhere in between «innocent teenage drama» and «experienced maturity», which allows her to effortlessly flutter between both modes, emphasizing one or the other depending on what she feels is more apt for each individual line. Take a moment to compare the two iterations of the chorus ("so if I broke your heart last night / it’s because I love you most of all") and you will see that each line is delivered with a different shade of emotion each time, and that there’s always a transition from «child» to «grown-up» between the first and second part. A subtle magic that might not be captured upon first listen, but is revealed with a little patience.
Not every song on the album gets an exquisite vocal treatment, but most of them do have enough of a flair to justify their existence. ‘Lazy River’ is taken with a somewhat tomboyish flavor, with Brenda reintroducing her trademark «growl» so as not to let it go to waste; even in the context of a slow-moving song, it gives the tune a spirit of defiant arrogance, turning Brenda into a modern day Huckleberry Finn of sorts (again, compare the recent flittery-fluffy version by Bobby Darin for a totally different attitude, closer to Hoagy Carmichael’s original). ‘It’s The Talk Of The Town’ is delivered with the same «teenage resignation» that would soon become the trademark of The Shangri-La’s (Brenda’s "I can’t show my face, can’t go anyplace" is the saddest I’ve ever heard this line from anyone), and there is something extremely empathetic in the way she concludes the bridge with "how can you face that?... what can you say?...", throwing in a modulation of genuine inquisitiveness — she’s just asking the audience for assistance, you know. And listening back to back to Paul Anka singing the big hit version of ‘I Miss You So’ with Brenda’s version also refreshingly reminds of the difference between, well, let’s call it «oversaturated» and «natural» singing.
That said, this empathetic vibe is best felt on the lonesome, melancholic, or desperate numbers; pure romantic serenades such as ‘How Deep Is The Ocean’ are not as easy to shower with praises, and the one or two songs taken by Brenda from gutsy rock’n’roll singers — Little Richard’s ‘Send Me Some Lovin’, for one thing — do not gain anything particularly special in her rendition. Unfortunately, as the album rolls on, the happier songs slowly start to prevail over the disillusioned ones, culminating in the record’s only (!!) fast-tempo number, ‘Fools Rush In’, which, ironically, is also its single most cuddly-sentimental track. Fortunately, the initial batch sets up such a positive impression that it is not entirely dissipated by the end of the LP, which only goes a wee bit over thirty minutes anyway.
The bottomline is that Sincerely can be quite «sincerely» recommended for all those already appreciative of Brenda’s voice and personal charisma in her peak years (almost incredible to think that all of those took place before she even hit 20, a trajectory usually reserved for rhythmic gymnastics rather than popular entertainment), but only for those who are ready to accept her lounge / pop side along with the rockabilly one. Admittedly, I think the album was never even expected to fare all that well — it consisted mainly of various outtakes from her 1961 sessions, it had no accompanying singles, and indeed it only rose to #29 on the charts, her lowest position since Grandma, What Great Songs You Sang! back in 1959 (which did not chart at all, so it wasn’t too hard to beat it, I guess). But I’ll still take it over any «average» country-pop collection emanating from Nashville at the time, precisely because Brenda Lee is so far removed from the stereotypical image of the «average» Nashville entertainer.
Only Solitaire reviews: Brenda Lee