Brenda Lee - The Definitive Collection [2006]

Brenda Lee was a torch singer who could somehow project emotions she was too young to have ever really experienced. She represented music for and by teenagers and eventually gained a sophistication that allowed her to seque into a popular adult performer.



With 1957's "Dynamite," pint-sized 12-year-old Brenda Lee earned her nickname Little Miss Dynamite. Her first top-tenner, 1960's "Sweet Nothin's" - with confidential-sounding whispered intro, Boots Randolph's yakkety sax solo, and Lee's vocals shifting from gutsy to kittenish - set the stage for her becoming that decade's top-charting solo female singer.



As he did with her Decca labelmate Patsy Cline, producer Owen Bradley soon moved her music uptown with the sweet string sections on "I'm Sorry," Italian-based "I Want to Be Wanted" (her two pop chart toppers) and "Emotions" These recordings helped to establish the Countrypolitan/Nashville Sound.



Clear sounding and generous with 28 (mostly) chronologically sequenced 1957-79 tracks, The Definitive Collection pays more attention to Lee's country-flavored pop hits than to her early rockabilly sides. Only "Nobody Wins," "Big Four Poster Bed" and "Tell Me What It's Like" come from her roster of country hits. It also includes "Dum Dum," "Fool #1" and nursery-rhyme-inspired "My Whole World Is Falling Down." From 1964, "Is It True?" features a pre-Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page on electric guitar. We also get "Anybody But Me" and the bouncy "Your Used To Be" which weren't on her more thoroughly annotated 1991 two-volume Anthology (which is still the best domestic Lee set).



By James E. Bagley "Jim Bagley" (Sanatoga, PA USA), amazon.com