“She makes me nervous”

On Brenda Lee

1.

In an essay featured here early last year, JSR wrote:

I still prefer the earliest period of rock and roll, let us say 1955-1965, to what came in the following decade. I love to see the contradictions mounting, the strangeness insisting on its own normalcy — Brenda Lee presented on TV by weird old men making awkward innuendos, billed as a cute little girl even as her voice channels traumatic scenes of an even earlier childhood of dirt floors and no plumbing… ; Little Richard, queer as fuck, doing his pure and wondrous thing in front of a segregated audience of screaming white girls — all of this just one massive self-contradictory powder-keg that you can tell is about to blow.

I agree with our Founding Editor, and I would like to begin by doing for the fateful year of 1955-1956 what JSR did in that essay for 1965-1966. I would like to show you, that is, what happened at that moment to shape the only world I’ll ever really know, a world that no longer exists, but that up to the end of the 20th century seemed so robust and all-pervasive as to be taken for granted, as the ambiance in which those of my tribe simply swam.

2.

In order to write the history of rock and roll as it demands to be written, you must place yourself somewhere ambiguously between believing and not believing that Robert Johnson sold his soul at the crossroads, and passed whatever new power he received for it down through the generations. In turn you must appreciate that the myth of the devil at the crossroads is really only the “scriptural” account of what can also be described in terms of natural history, by evocation of the long phylogenies of folk cultures, and the strands that connect their practices to forgotten ancestors, and by evocation too of the great charge of danger these popular practices, and these invisible systems of transgenerational transmission of learning, seem to bear to the educated elite. Whether you buy the myth in its most robust metaphysical rendering, or not, I mean, if you want to say anything true about this history you must admit that you are probing into dangerous dark secrets, and not simply reminiscing over a lost age of youthful fun, as had already become the dominant mode of cultural processing of the 1950s less than two decades after the fact, in such commercial representations as Grease or Happy Days.

3.

I believe I have succeeded in isolating the precise moment in American history when the cracks in the segregationist wall grew large enough for a bit of Johnson’s bad seed to seep through, and, it must have seemed, to make white America lose control of itself. It happens, namely, on August 18, 1956, on a transmission of Red Foley’s Ozark Jubilee on ABC Television, from a network affiliate in Springfield, Missouri.

The bearer of the bad news is not who you probably think it is either — it is not Elvis, and it is certainly not Pat Boone, though they both deserve mention in this story too. The vehicle of the traduction, the mock-Theotokos of our postwar American religion, was an eleven-year-old girl, still alive as I write this today, and who remains consistently undervalued for the part she played as catalyst of the rock and roll era. The reason for her neglect, as we’ll see, is as important for our postwar cultural history as the nature of her original contribution.

But let us first go back one year earlier. It was in September, 1955, that Little Richard recorded “Tutti Frutti”, at J & M Studio in New Orleans, after having sent a demo tape to Specialty Records in February. Both the demo and the familiar recorded version are extreme bowdlerizations of the version that Little Richard had already been performing for years in New Orleans drag clubs. The original lyrics, as he sang them there, had to do not with the many varieties of ice-cream flavors one might enjoy, but rather, quite unambiguously, with the celebration of anal sex: “Tutti Frutti, good booty / If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can grease it, make it easy”, and so on. Local songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie, who is said to have had no real taste for rock music, was called in to provide a new batch of radio-friendly lyrics for the song, and by the end of 1955 it was on the airwaves, and spread abroad throughout the world. The lyrics were now corny as hell, but this did not fully solve the problem. No matter what nonsense rhymes Little Richard ended up singing, the song itself remained, in its spirit, aggressively and irredeemably obscene. Just listen to it.

The familiar understanding of what happened next is in need of some revision. Even in the 21st century most of us have some lingering awareness of the outsized role of Elvis Presley in the great whitewashing of Black popular musical forms. But a closer look at the different ways different white artists took up these forms, with very different demographic profiles and class habituses between them, and with very different aesthetic results, should compel us to rethink our usual understanding of the ethics and cultural politics of appropriation. We tend to forget that before Elvis recorded “Tutti Frutti”, in March, 1956, the much-hated Pat Boone had already released his own version. And we forget, too, that for a good part of the late 1950s, Boone consistently outperformed Elvis on the charts. But why was this right-wing Floridian, this devout parishioner of the Church of Christ, this peer of John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, out there singing an only lightly euphemized paean to sodomy? Boone’s intervention might best be understood not so much as an appropriation, but as a containment operation. Little Richard’s power was such as to be able to sing his true meanings right through the euphemisms; Boone’s work was to complete the neutralizing effect that LaBostrie’s bowdlerization was meant, unsuccessfully, to have.

And this may have worked, if it had not been for Brenda Lee.

4.

Brenda was a sort of child prodigy, a dirt-poor low-birth-weight baby who by the age of three had instinctively taken to imitating what she heard on the radio — which means, in early 1950s Georgia, a good deal of Hank Williams and Peggy Lee, among other widely disparate musical styles. Her mother was the very archetype of the poor white stage-mom, and by early 1956 had arranged for her kid to ride the bus between Georgia and Missouri to appear on Red Foley’s country-music variety show. The Ozark Jubilee stands today as the voluminous archive of a forgotten world of entertainment; one can sense its continuity with vaudeville, with barn dances, and all those popular entertainments lost to time. It still seems incidental to all the goings-on at this jubilee that there happen to be cameras pointed at them. You’re still getting the real thing; this is no Baudrillardian “spectacle”.

That’s not to say it’s not at all of its age. Already with country-western radio variety shows as early as the 1930s, we find a remarkable layering of spontaneous folk forms with a commercial savvy that was surely absent at any frontier hoedown of a century before. When you listen to Hank on the “Mother’s Best Flour” show, you’re getting gospel hymns, and square dances, and the interspersed ads for fertilizer might easily seem to be of a pair with all of this. But think harder — you’re hearing ads for industrial chemical by-products, of the sort German scientists had developed just a few decades earlier in the initial aim of making war that much nastier, with only the collateral effect of outperforming manure in the fields and of fucking up the planet’s nitrogen cycle; and you’re hearing it on the radio. Even the poor rural folks, by the early 1950s, were fully integrated into the new industrial economy, projected by new telecommunication tools, that the global wars of the first half of the century had imposed on us.

Foley’s show had been an important node in this premodern-modern system. Although it was broadcast nationwide, it was coded as regional, and targeted a specific class of rural Americans. As a result, this show, like others of its kind, often featured performers with a rawness to them that would not have been allowed on higher-register entertainments out of New York or Los Angeles — witness for example the performance of “Tutti Frutti” on August 18, 1956, which, I have contended, represents one of the key moments, perhaps the key moment, in understanding postwar American history. Seriously, watch it. Brenda’s inexplicably sinister look, her utter seriousness in enunciating “A wop bop a loo bop”, her hiccup on the final word when she sings “She’s a real gone cookie” (I think that’s what she’s singing; it’s impossible to say, since this is in fact a further bowdlerization of LaBodrie’s “She knows how to love me”). Brenda is imitating Elvis here more pronouncedly than Little Richard, but in truth the idea of “imitation”, like “appropriation”, seems out of place. What she is really doing is channeling.

5.

All of the great white channelers of early rock and roll —among whom I include Elvis, Brenda, and Jerry Lee Lewis— come from a similar demographic: poor white Southerners with deep family connections to the evangelical church (there was a lovely reminder of this in Jimmy Swaggart’s recent obituary, which spoke of his childhood musical explorations with his cousin Jerry Lee). And all of them, in the years following rock’s Bohemianization after the British Invasion and the arrival of psychedelia in the mid-1960s, would eventually make their way back to a form of musical expression more continuous with their white Southern Christian identity.

But all that was still years away, when Perry Como’s New York producers caught sight of little Brenda on Foley’s show, and invited her to appear on this premier platform for mainstream American sensibilities. They did not let her perform “Tutti Frutti”, of course, and instead imposed on her a ridiculous children’s song called “Doodle Bug Rag”. But if they had hoped to do more Pat Boone-style containment work by this choice, their plan surely backfired. Nowhere does Brenda Lee appear more sinister than in this debut performance on The Perry Como Show in what must be late 1956. Dinah Shore speaks volumes when she says to the host, of the guest about to perform: “She’s so wonderful she makes me nervous.” And Como replies: “She’d make anybody nervous.” This is supposed to be praiseful banter, but it’s hard not to get the sense that the two of them are in fact nervous. I mean, she makes me nervous, 69 years later — me, for whom Nurse With Wound and Throbbing Gristle and Merzbow were musical mother’s milk. When I watch her I can’t but think: That little dance she does! What is that?! My heavens, what a storm is brewing in there!

Remarkably, Perry Como does seem to have had considerable success in domesticating Brenda’s raw power, and indeed played a significant role in transforming her, by 1958 or so, from a dour little prodigy into a full-spectrum and utterly captivating performer. She seems to grow into her public self on his show. In one remarkable episode, the host, through some hasty non-sequitur, has occasion to ask Brenda what the definition of a “square” is; she lowers her head in shame, and says she knows, but can’t tell him, and then runs away. The joke is that Perry Como is himself the “square”, beloved by parents, Italian, but still in context a beacon of uncontested whiteness, while she’s a spunky youth in touch with more primal forces he cannot really understand.

It was in the same year as Brenda’s debut on that show that she released “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, which I will not link because everyone born after 1958 knows it a priori anyway, as if by anamnesis; anyhow I’m happy she’s still getting massive royalty checks for the part she plays in our seasonal suffering, and I suppose it’s still not as bad as Paul McCartney’s “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” (1980), which was written and recorded by the same guy who wrote and recorded the song that caused the Manson murders — rock and roll, in the broad sense, has found many ways to do harm. We know the Beatles have a mixed legacy; what I’m trying to do here, in part, is to remix Brenda’s too, and to save her from the widespread impression, for those who remember her name at all, that she is primarily an icon of holiday commercialism.

6.

In 1960 Brenda released the powerful pop ballad “I’m Sorry”, which we all also know, but I’ll still link it because it’s so good. She was now in many respects at the height of international stardom, with appearances soon to come on the Ed Sullivan Show, and tremendously successful international tours in the UK, Europe, and Japan. This is what I think of as “golden age” Brenda Lee, between the vernacular prodigy phase, and the late phase that I have yet to describe and that holds, as we will soon see, the most important lessons for understanding our postwar history.

Between 1958 and 1964, roughly, Brenda Lee is a plain master of the international pop style — even offering versions of her songs, as was the convention at the time, in French, German, and Japanese. Not in this period nor in any other would one think to call her sexy, but she is positively radiant. She is no longer an androgynous little stub, but plainly a female star. From this period I think my favorite performances are her rendition of “Jambalaya” and, even more than that, this evidently lip-synced proto-video for “Kansas City” — both of these songs, notably, being, in their various renditions by artists of various races, among the finest examples of American musical métissage, which indeed has everything to do with the specific geographical locations they celebrate. Watch in particular the last part of “Kansas City”, from about 1’30’’. That is a girl in complete control of her craft, no longer just a channeler, but now a shaper of the spirit of her time.

You can see, if you look closely at performances from this era, a shared gestural language with other shapers already on the scene, and soon to come. I can’t quite prove it, but there is a look she makes, at around 1’08’’, that I’m convinced is the earliest expression of what would become a very familiar part of the gestural repertoire of rock and roll — perhaps the very most paradigmatic instance of the “rock-and-roll face”, which you can plainly see Mick Jagger, for example, making a decade or so later (what I have in mind doesn’t quite come through in these screenshots; you have to watch them in motion).

7.

In 1964 Brenda Lee is back in London, 20 years old, already a veteran in the business. She connects with Jimmy Page, long pre-Zeppelin, and records with him a version of Ray Charles’s 1959 “What’d I Say”, a key work in the emerging canon of rock-and-roll standards, even if Ray himself never had any great investment in this musical form. The Beatles are often credited with first adapting avant-garde drone technique into pop music in “Ticket to Ride” (1965), having been influenced by LaMonte Young’s 1962 composition “The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer”, which was in turn drawing on classical Indian tradition. But listen to the orchestration of the Page/Lee version of Ray Charles’s song; if that is not quite a drone, technically speaking, it is nonetheless is at least the discovery of a new way to “go hard” in pop music, in comparison with which the Beatles seem to be playing catch-up on Rubber Soul a year later.

That hardness, I’m starting to think, is the expression of a deep ras-le-bol frustration characteristic of the earliest rock-and-roll performers who, by 1964, were facing their own obsolescence, with the arrival, heralded by the British Invasion, of something headier, artsier, more genteel. The result of this is, I believe, some of the purest rock and roll ever made, by stars already on their way out, or on their way into a radical metamorphosis. As we have noted before in this space, the hardest, purest, most significant concert recording in the history of rock and roll was made in that year, of a performance of Jerry Lee Lewis at the Star Club in Hamburg. Jerry Lee was playing songs that already threatened to come across, if performed too tamely, as “50s retro”. He was still in exile from the puritanical US after the scandal of having married his 13-year-old cousin; and he was mad as hell.

Brenda Lee was undergoing some kind of similar transformation, but she was, in her moral character, a far more decent person, and so the signs of this transformation do not quite come across as anger. But what she does with “What’d I Say”, that same year, plainly shares something in the spirit that had entirely overtaken Jerry Lee. There is another recording of “What’d I Say”, in Tokyo, which, judging from the hairstyle and the sound, I also place in 1964. It’s of poor quality, but it speaks volumes. Of particular note is the formation of a gauntlet by the male musicians, which she enters for the quiet part towards the end, at one point stroking one of the guitarist’s heads. All of this looks like the sort of conceit you might find on the Perry Como Show, passed down from the routines of true femme-fatale performers like Marlene Dietrich already in the inter-war period; you might also picture Eartha Kitt, or some other Broadway-adjacent performer, in a similar posture, making a “rowrrr” sound. But when Brenda gets on her knees, at 2’37’’, this is entirely part of the gestural repertoire she shares with Little Richard (compare his performance of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” in London in 1963). It is, still, a fully undomesticated gesture, and one of the last we will ever see in Brenda Lee’s performance style. For like Jerry Lee Lewis, and to some extent like Elvis and even Dylan, Brenda is about to defect from rock and roll altogether, and to return to the musical form she knew first.

8.

Before I go any further, let me say, Brenda, dear, if you are reading this: I’ve studied all available documentation of your public life, and every second of it testifies to what a kind, decent, joyous, and joy-giving person you are. But the fact that you have had a public life means that you are also a vessel of history, and sometimes history’s brightest stars, like you dear, can help us in the sorrowful duty of tracing history’s darkening.

And things did grow darker, after the brief flare of ebullient promise that seemed to be delivered by a succession of musical messengers in the decade or so beginning around 1955.

The great shift from rock and roll to country in the late 1960s is one of the most important, and least understood, processes in the history of postwar American culture. Why did it happen? There is a common view that it represents a recoil from the métissage that came so naturally to white Southern children like Brenda Lee — by a simple shift away from the blues scale, the idea goes, a generation of maturing white musical artists sought to undo the careless race-mixing of their earlier careers. I think that might well describe some of the artists in question, including Jerry Lee, but what Brenda’s case shows —who in podcasts as recent as the present decade continues to describe Little Richard as “so sweet” and as “my dear friend”—, is that the shift had more to do with a perceived need to dissociate from the hippies than from the Blacks, to use period language for describing the top two groups on Nixon’s threat list. It was the forced elevation of rock and roll into the register of high-art expressivity, aided by marijuana, then by acid, then by 1966 or so its full flowering as the musical accompaniment of youth countercultural rupture. It was, I’m sorry to have to say, the fucking Beatles.

That’s not fair of course. The Beatles were themselves strong advocates of country; T. Bone Burnett has said that Ringo Starr is the only English drummer ever to play a Texas shuffle convincingly. But still, something shifted in the 1960s, to the point that the great white rock-and-roll channelers of the 1950s could no longer find their place in that world. And so they went back home.

9.

As you will know, I am Welsh, but I have significant ties to the United States. Long before I moved to New Mexico, I spent part of my childhood in Houston (roughly 1983 to 1987), when my father was an associate professor of British literature at Rice University — he was working at that time on his Penguin critical edition of the Y Goddodin. Whenever I turned the TV on back then, after the cathode tubes or whatever they were had warmed up, the picture of the strange country surrounding us generally looked something like this:

Or like this:

Or like this:

Or like this:

That world, I hardly need to tell you, is gone, baby, gone. But this only means that to retrieve it, now, cannot fail to fill us with wonder. Commit to performing the marathon feat of attention, and watch, but really watch, this gospel number by Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson, et al., and marvel at the foreignness of their conventions, at the little tricks they pull to delight the crowd, the inexplicable but unmistakable comedy of Willie’s grand entrance.

That world is gone, but curiously at least three of the performers of the gospel number are still alive. And all three —Dolly, Willie, and Brenda— are noteworthy for the exceptional character of their aging. Willie has been old forever; Dolly has been young forever. But Brenda’s life-cycle is the most peculiar of all. We knew her first as a child runt (1956-1958), then as a radiant young woman (1958-1964), then, in all the public appearances I have been able to study coming later than the performance of “What’d I Say” in Tokyo, as a proper dame, with rhinestones and an orange bouffant, and only the faintest blush of sex implied in her self-presentation.

The songs she interprets, from the late 1960s on, consistently portray a person well into the part of life’s arc characterized by disappointment and decline. Here she is with Willie, for example, evoking a scene of separation and divorce. This performance takes place in 1976, when she is 32, an age at which Madonna will have barely begun to move through her many personae, all of which, even to this day, are supposed to have something to do with sexuality. Rock and pop, as I have often emphasized in this space, offer their stars few pathways for aging gracefully; this is a fortiori so for their female stars. Country music has typically been much more accommodating, and, you might say, humane. It wants its stars to look as chewed-up and spit-out by life as its listeners.

But this seems to have been more a conscious choice than an inevitability, for Brenda Lee. So why did she settle into a form of life, and a mode of self-presentation, that look more like what we would expect from Tammy Faye Bakker than from, say, Patti Smith? Isn’t Patti supposed to be the very model of elder female rock-and-roll royalty? What does it say about the cultural history of rock and roll, and about the enormous gaps in the way we represent it, that its eldest stateswomen conform not at all to the model we educated types enjoy holding up and contemplating, with its solid Bohemian pedigree reaching back to the dandies, to absinthe and to Baudelaire, but to the clapboard shacks and agricultural settings where it in fact incubated and grew?

10.

Patti Smith is still lurking around Paris and Berlin, “giving readings”. Dinah Shore got so nervous she retired to Rancho Mirage and spent her later years hosting golf tournaments, at which you might well spot Alice Cooper on the putting green.

Jerry Lee, Elvis, Little Richard, Brenda — all of them followed a different life trajectory. This, I have come to think, is to be explained principally by the fact that they could never forget, at the peak of their artistic power, that what they were doing was, at bottom, making a mockery of the church, which could not fail to call them back sooner or later. They experienced the cycles of sin and redemption in terms of Protestant theology, though there is likely also a significant strain of Catholic carnival in it as well, such as is celebrated in Louisiana. (Little Richard also claimed for a long time to be Jewish, evidently on the basis of something he learned at an Oklahoma Bible college about the true identity of Seventh Day Adventists.) It is the fact that they are always performing with their backs turned to the church, the fact that they can always feel it behind them as if by a second sight, that makes their music so damned good.

What the elevation of rock and roll to high-art expressivity effectively does, then, from the Beatles through Patti Smith, is to break the music out of its essential dialectical relationship with worship, and to cause its creators and consumers to believe, falsely, that that’s not the sort of thing that need concern them anymore.

This analysis is somewhat complicated by my strong conviction that Robert Johnson, for his part, at the mythological start of it all, was himself striving for some kind of high-art expressivity too. “Hell Hound on My Trail”, for example, has more the quality of a tone-poem than what you could expect from any pure distillation of vernacular tradition. This is why those suits in New York were hoping to track him down and to bring him to Carnegie Hall in 1938, unaware that he was already dead, likely of syphilis, at 27. Still, it is impossible not to think of his legacy as one of taking a vernacular undercurrent of American culture and entirely reshaping that culture through it. The devil’s bargain, if that is what there was, had less to do with gaining mastery over the guitar, which is how the usual story goes, as with gaining mastery over the recording industry, the airwaves, and, ultimately, the collective id of America and its global empire. This covenant, which I suppose we may date to 1936 and 1937 in Texas, when Johnson had his only two recording sessions, cannot fail now to appear as something like the Old Testament of a new popular religion, to be fulfilled after the war by Little Richard and a succession of others who shared, likely without knowing how or why, in the same dark secret that had been traduced down, from the Delta to New Orleans, to the radio, and, ultimately, to the apostles on the Perry Como Show and beyond.

It doesn’t matter at all, for this mythology to be true, who these people actually were, or what they later became. And this is because they were, all of them, as I have suggested, channelers, an older term for which is “prophets”. Their prophecies were mostly glossolalic in their delivery, spoken in nonsense syllables, but everyone understood exactly what they meant.

The prophecies stopped coming by 1966 or so. What we were left with, from then on, was nostalgia, a reimagining of the 1950s as a period of conformity rather than as the period of the first unmistakable signs of conformity’s failure. And wherever rock and roll attempted to break with nostalgia and to speak boldly about the present in a way that might also make visible the rough outlines of the future, what we mostly got were pseudo-prophecies and posturing: all the wasteful and pointless concept albums, all the middlebrow messaging. The ones who avoided both of these fates, who remained true to themselves, are the ones who, paradoxically, appeared from afar, according to elite sensibilities, to undergo the greatest decline in excellence, from explosive cultural revolutionaries to low-status country-western variety-show has-beens. But there was nowhere else for the likes of Brenda Lee to go, than to go country. This says a lot about America, and its racial legacies, and the failure of the utopian hopes that were for a brief time spoken openly in the 1960s. It says nothing about Brenda Lee’s merits as an artist.

By now, of course, country music is really nothing more than right-wing identitarian pop. Our friend Sam Kriss claims to love even this, but I suspect he’s mostly putting us on. The only thing that can move the human spirit today, with any of the power anyway that I would consider minimally necessary for an experience to qualify as aesthetic at all, is the amply documented record of our human artistic past.

The last age of the prophets is a very good period to focus on, for example, if one is in search of aesthetic experience. It keeps me occupied, anyhow, and enraptured — not, I insist, in the vein of nostalgia, but of wonder, and, like Dinah before me, of no small fear and trembling.