Brenda Lee is a singer who enjoyed great success as a Child performer. She was also a teen idol, easy-listening chanteuse, and country music queen. Brenda was known as Little Miss Dynamite, who sustained through all these transformations in her career with her strong voice. It belied her diminutive stature.
When she was five, Brenda won a talent show. Following this, she regularly appeared on local Atlanta radio and television. She performed with fellow local singing star Wyche Fowler In the early 1950s. Fowler later became a prominent U.S. congressman from Georgia.
At the age of nine, her father passed away after a construction accident, leaving her as the family’s primary breadwinner. In 1955, the family moved to Augusta, where the young singer shortened her last name to “Lee” at the suggestion of a local television producer.
Lee got her big break when she joined country star Red Foley onstage at the Bell Auditorium in Augusta in 1956. She belted out Hank Williams’s Jambalaya. He later signed her to appear on his Ozark Jubilee, the first nationally televised country music show. Millions of viewers were charmed by her precocious talent. Lee soon became one of the first singers whose career was launched by television.
The 1960s was the peak of her career. She gained global popularity through constant worldwide touring and multilingual recordings. During this decade, her songs reached Billboard’s pop, country, rhythm and blues, and adult contemporary charts fifty-five times. It made her the most successful female performer of that decade. This placed her fourth overall in the decade behind Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Ray Charles.
Her remarkable ability to master different styles allowed Lee to adapt gracefully as she outgrew her teen idol status. She married Ronnie Shacklett in the early 1960s. Lee was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 1982. She received the Jo Walker Meador Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 from SOURCE, a nonprofit organization in Nashville.
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