Brenda Lee on Hitting No. 1 With ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,’ After Record-Breaking 65-Year Climb: ‘You Can’t Keep a Good Song Down’
05.12.2023 - 04:23
/ variety.com
Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic It’s hard to quite think of someone who was as big a veritable child star as Brenda Lee was in the late ’50s and early ’60s a “late bloomer.” Nor can “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” really be considered an underdog song, after its accrual of quintuple-platinum sales over the decades. And yet it’s spent the last several years peaking at No. 2 each December, after spending most of its lifetime not annually charting at all.
Now it’s finally No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, 65 years after its release. The previous record-holder for the longest climb to the top? Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which took a mere 25 years to accomplish what took “Rockin'” nearly three times as long.
Not coincidentally, Carey’s song also looked to be the tune that would forever keep Lee’s in second place, possibly eternally, until the Christmas tortoise caught up with the Christmas hare this week. Variety spent time with Lee at her home in Nashville in November to talk about the song’s extremely long tail. When “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” unexpectedly made a leap to No.
1 with the release of the latest chart news Monday, we quickly got her back on the phone for an update on just how she was feeling. In a word: jolly. The following exchange combines excerpts from both conversations with the 78-year-old legend, who remains one of the few women to have been inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Country Hall of Fame.
You know, some of us might be more excited about this going No. 1 than you are. I don’t know how you could be. If I could jump out of my clothes, I would.
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