Voice of Experience

With typical Gallic acuity, a Paris newspaper recently tipped its readers off to the fact that the fastest-rising U.S. teen-age singing star is in reality a 32-year-old midget. U.S. editors prefer to accept the claims of her pressagent that Songstress Brenda Lee is barely 16 years old and that her growth pattern is entirely normal (she now stands 4 ft. 11 1/2| in.). The difference of opinion is understandable, for Brenda peers at the world through mascaraed eyes of ageless innocence while crooning her mating songs in a voice that is part whisky, part Negroid, and all woman. The amalgam had, at last counting, put Brenda nearly up with her male counterparts--Fabian and Paul Anka--as one of the teen-age tycoons.

Brenda's two albums--This Is Brenda and Brenda Lee--have sold a quarter-million copies in half a year and are still riding high. Brenda's version of Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree is this year's hottest seasonal hit, and two other singles. I Want To Be Wanted and I'm Sorry, have between them sold 2 1/2 million copies.Apparently, Brenda is at her most appealing to the 7-to-17 set when she is most world wary:

I'm sorry, so sorry

That I was such a fool

I didn't know

Love could be so crool.

Brenda seems to have sounded like a down South Sadie Thompson almost from the moment she opened her mouth. Born Brenda Lee Tarpley in Atlanta, she had her own 15-minute television show at six. Although she recently bought a $31,000 house in a Nashville suburb, she now spends most of her time on the road.

Singing such numbers as Dynamite, Bill Bailey, When the Saints Go Marching In, she can transform herself with a clap of her chubby hands from a comics-reading teen-ager into a tortured woman. But her career suggests a peculiar problem: if she sounds 32 at 16, how will she sound at 20?

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