Recorded in 1958, Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree has long since joined the select group of festive songs that boom out of radios, shops and pubs at this time of year. The song – which also featured in the hit 1990 film Home Alone – is definitively seasonal, from its gentle rock’n’rolling groove to its: “Deck the halls with boughs of holly”.
Now, 65 years after its first release, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree has finally reached No 1 in the US chart. “It’s been a week, I tell you!” says Lee over a Zoom call from her home in Nashville. Aged 78, she became the oldest person to score a US chart-topper (she is now 79), overtaking Louis Armstrong, who was 63 when Hello, Dolly! went to No 1 in 1964.
Lee was just 13 years old when she recorded the song, on 19 October 1958. Before recording it, the producer Owen Bradley made sure she “did her homework” – she learned the song so well that in the studio she nailed it in three takes. “He had the air conditioning turned down to zero, a Christmas tree in the studio and all the musicians wore Santa hats,” she remembers. “That was just magical for a 13-year-old.”
The song was written by Johnny Marks, who also penned festive favourites Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and A Holly Jolly Christmas. “When it became a hit I said to him: ‘Johnny, you’re Jewish, you don’t even believe in Christmas.’ He said: ‘Well I do now!’”
The single stalled on release in 1958, but reached the Top 20 in 1960 after Lee’s two No 1s that year (I’m Sorry and I Want to Be Wanted) had made her a huge star. Lee delivers the song in her inimitable rasp and it taps into perennial Christmassy themes of togetherness, family and nostalgia, but she is mystified as to why it has proved so enduring. “I’m puzzled,” she admits, “but it’s a good puzzle.” This year has been “surreal” she says. “I’m reliving the 1960s. I’m hugely grateful to the fans … I’ve had the same wonderful record company since I was 10 years old. I was just so blessed to have great songwriters. You can’t keep a good song down.”
Lee was born Brenda Mae Tarpley in Atlanta, Georgia, grew up in houses with no plumbing or running water and shared a bed with her brother and sister. “It was like The Flintstones,” she says, “but those experiences helped me. I had a great mom, and dad until he passed away, and I loved singing. I think people love it when you’re real.”
She first sang in public at a local ballroom called the Sports Arena, where her mother danced and let her get on stage. Then she became a regular on the country music show TV Ranch, which was broadcast from Atlanta. “That’s pretty much how I started down in Georgia.” She was just eight years old when her father died in a construction accident. “He was a quiet man, but a handsome man and a hard worker,” she remembers. “His nickname for me was Booty – Booty Mae. I haven’t a clue where that came from. I still miss him, but I think he would be proud.”
After her father’s death she became the breadwinner of the family and started touring when she was nine. “You’re excited about doing it, then you’ve done it,” she shrugs, “then you go play in the dirt.” Another TV show, Ozark Jubilee, broadcast from Missouri, catapulted her to national attention and led to a contract with the record label Decca. “I don’t know if I realised the scope of all that,” she says. “I never worried about the business end. I just loved to sing.”
She toured with Jerry Lee Lewis during the heat of the 1950s rock’n’roll explosion. “He was a wild man,” she says. “Nobody had seen that kind of energy on stage. He would have people pulling chairs out of the concrete floors in auditoriums.” Helpfully, when Lee went on, the seats were still in place. “I wouldn’t want to have followed him,” she laughs.
Her early fans included Elvis Presley, who loved her mix of rockabilly and country and saw her perform at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. She still treasures a photograph she has of them together. “We had a connection because he wasn’t putting it on,” she says. “He was a poor boy from the south who loved his mama and wanted to do good for her.”
As success blossomed, she toured with Gene Vincent – who was “gentle, but crazy” – and played the Star-Club in Hamburg with the Beatles as the opening act. “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 [Decca famously told the Beatles, “Guitar groups are on the way out”], but it was obvious that they were stars.” Lennon later described Lee as “The greatest rock’n’roll voice of them all.”
She remembers Judy Garland told her: “Don’t let them take your childhood.” But Lee insists she was never waylaid by drink, drugs or scandal. “I was around that stuff but I wasn’t in that stuff,” she says, crediting her humble upbringing and “good people” around her for keeping her grounded. “My mama always said: ‘Don’t get above your raisin’.’” Her 60-year marriage to Ronnie Shacklett has helped, too. They married when she was 18, less than six months after first meeting at a Jackie Wilson concert: “I looked across the room and there he sat. My husband to be.” Because she was so young – and at a key stage in her career – her family and management all boycotted the wedding, but the couple (who have two daughters, Jolie and Julie, and three grandchildren) have proved the naysayers wrong. “You work at it, because you love and revere it,” she says. “And it works if you work.”
She continues to inspire younger artists, too. An 18-year-old Taylor Swift wrote a tribute to her titled Rare Peer (later published in the 2017 book Woman Walk the Line). “There’s a reason she’s been able to move people to their feet for almost 60 years,” Swift wrote. “Brenda Lee is grace. Brenda Lee is class and composure. Brenda Lee is someone I will always look up to because of the way she shines. As Johnny Cash said in 1983, it’s almost like she’s golden.”
“I think I’ll put that on my epitaph!” says Lee when I read it to her. “I’m not done yet, but Taylor is a phenomenon. I first met her when she was 11. She was precocious, smart and she had her head on straight. She knew where she was going and boy has she gone there.”
In the 60s, Lee had 46 US Hot 100 singles – more than anyone else that decade except Presley, the Beatles and Ray Charles – and she has sold more than 100m records. But Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree has ended up eclipsing them all.
The song has been covered countless times, including by Kim Wilde and Mel Smith (whose version reached No 3 in the UK in 1987) and more recently Kacey Musgraves and Camila Cabello (2019), and Justin Bieber (2021). Sophie Ellis-Bextor is singing it on her tour this month and the Yorkshire folk singer Kate Rusby covers it on her new album, Light Years.
This year, TikTok clips and a new video featuring Lee, a Christmas tree (of course) and cameos by country stars Tanya Tucker and Trisha Yearwood helped the song to go viral. “We kind of did it seriously but it’s tongue in cheek too,” she says. “We had a good time.” She still keeps in touch with music, admiring the likes of Swift and Musgraves: “I like to see the girls do good.” She has retired from touring but still makes occasional appearances: “Living in Nashville, there’s always things that people call me to do, so that’s taken its place.” Recently, a video of her singing Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree on a flight went viral, too.
“We hit a lot of turbulence and people were uncomfortable,” she explains. “Somebody yelled out: ‘Brenda, get up and sing.’ So I did.” Such is the potency of Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, you can get a sentimental feeling even when being bumped around at 30,000 feet. “I’ve always loved to sing for people,” she says. “All I need is an invitation.”