BRENDA LEE - I'm Sorry 1960 Sheet Music Signature Song

Printed music. 4 pages, including exterior ­­ 2 pages of music & words; Pictorial front exterior is printed in ultramarine-blue and features a fine half-tone photograph of young Brenda Lee. A simply lovely portrait of the pert teenage star.

CONDITION:

This is a used and well worn bit of rock history. This sheet music was owned by a performer who did covers of various pop songs at the time that the songs were new and fresh. He annotated the music in pencil with his own chord progressions and playing instructions, etc. The front exterior surface and edge wear is very mild -- there is a small tear to the top edge, which shows on both sheets and the corners are softly bumped -- surface rub is minimal .... Other than the penciled annotations, the interior is clean and presentable. All things considered - the music - the star - the popularity -- this is a very nicely preserved piece of pop history. There are very few of these circulating on the market.

The original owner, a performer of pop song covers, bought this music when it was new. It was part of his working collection, and he annotated the music in pencil in order to learn and perform it in public; just think of that young rock fan -- a performer himself, trying out this song when it was new and fresh. That's pretty nifty in my book!

Penciled on the first page of the music the date 7/29/60. Both pages have a few musical notations, but this piece of sheet music is less annotated than some of this cover performer's sheets.

"I'm Sorry" is Brenda Lee's signature song. Along with "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree", it is her biggest hit and garnered her first gold record.

ABOUT BRENDA LEE (FROM WIKIPEDIA):

Brenda Mae Tarpley (born December 11, 1944), better known as Brenda Lee, is an American performer who sang rockabilly, pop and country music with equal conviction and power; and had 37 US chart hits during the 1960s, a number surpassed only by Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Ray Charles and Connie Francis.[1] She is best known for her 1960 hit "I'm Sorry," and 1957's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," a perennial US holiday standard for 50 years.

At 4 ft 9 inches tall, she received the nickname Little Miss Dynamite in 1957 after recording the song "Dynamite"; and was one of the earliest pop stars to have a major contemporary international following.

Lee's popularity faded in the late 1960s as her voice matured, but she continued a successful recording career by returning to her roots as a country singer with a string of hits through the 1970s and 80s. She is a member of the Rock and Roll, Country Music and Rockabilly halls of fame, and currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Lee's voice, pretty face and stage presence won her wider attention from the time she was five years old. At age six, she won a local singing contest sponsored by local elementary schools. The reward was a live appearance on an Atlanta radio show, Starmakers Revue, where she performed for the next year.

Her father died in 1953, and by the time she turned ten, she was the primary breadwinner of her family through singing at events and on local radio and television shows. In 1955, Grayce Tarpley remarried to Buell "Jay" Rainwater, who moved the family to Cincinnati, Ohio where he worked at the Jimmy Skinner Music Center. Lee performed with Skinner at the record shop on two Saturday programs broadcast over Newport, Kentucky radio station WNOP-AM. The family soon returned to Georgia, however, this time to Augusta, and Lee appeared on the show The Peach Blossom Special on WJAT-AM in Swainsboro. The show's producer, Sammy Barton, rechristened the little singer Brenda Lee, believing that Tarpley was too difficult to remember.

Her break into big-time show business came in February 1955, when she turned down $30 to appear on a Swainsboro radio station to see Red Foley and a touring promotional unit of his ABC-TV program Ozark Jubilee in Augusta. An Augusta DJ convinced Foley to hear her sing before the show. Foley was as transfixed as everyone else who heard the huge voice coming from the tiny girl and immediately agreed to let her to perform "Jambalaya" on stage that night, unrehearsed. Foley later recounted the moments following her introduction:

"I still get cold chills thinking about the first time I heard that voice. One foot started patting rhythm as though she was stomping out a prairie fire but not another muscle in that little body even as much as twitched. And when she did that trick of breaking her voice, it jarred me out of my trance enough to realize I'd forgotten to get off the stage. There I stood, after 26 years of supposedly learning how to conduct myself in front of an audience, with my mouth open two miles wide and a glassy stare in my eyes".

The audience erupted in applause and refused to let her leave the stage until she had sung three more songs. On March 31, 1955, the 11-year-old made her network debut on Ozark Jubilee in Springfield, Missouri, and she made regular appearances on the program throughout its run.

Less than two months later-on July 30, 1956-Decca Records offered her a contract, and her first record was "Jambayala" backed with "Bigelow 6-200." Lee's second single would feature two novelty Christmas tunes: "I'm Gonna Lasso Santa Claus," and "Christy Christmas." Though she turned 12 on December 11, 1956, both of the first two Decca singles credit her as "Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old)."

Neither of the 1956 releases charted, but her first issue in '57, "One Step at a Time," became a hit in both the pop and country fields. Her next hit, "Dynamite," coming out of a 4 ft 9 inch frame, led to her lifelong nickname, Little Miss Dynamite.

Lee first attracted attention performing in country music venues and shows; however, her label and management felt it best to market her exclusively as a pop artist, the result being that none of her best-known recordings from the 1960s were released to country radio, and despite her country sound, with top Nashville session people, she did not have another country hit until 1969, and "Johnny One Time."

Lee achieved her biggest success on the pop charts in the late 1950s through the mid-1960s with rockabilly and rock and roll-styled songs. Her biggest hits included "Jambalaya," "Sweet Nothin's" (number four) (written by country musician Ronnie Self), "I Want to Be Wanted" (number one), "All Alone Am I" (number three) and "Fool #1" (number three). She had more hits with the more pop-based songs "That's All You Gotta Do" (number six), "Emotions" (number seven), "You Can Depend on Me" (number six), "Dum Dum" (number four), 1962's "Break It To Me Gently" (number 2), "Everybody Loves Me But You" (number six), and "As Usual" (number 12).

The biggest-selling track of Lee's career was a Christmas song. In 1958, when she was 13, producer Owen Bradley asked her to record a new song by Johnny Marks, who had had success writing Christmas tunes for country singers, most notably "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (Gene Autry) and "A Holly, Jolly Christmas" (Burl Ives). Lee recorded the song, "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," in July with a prominent twanging guitar part by Hank Garland. Decca released it as a single that November, but it sold only 5,000 copies, and did not do much better when it was released again in 1959. However, it eventually sold more than five million copies.

In 1960, she recorded her signature song, "I'm Sorry", which hit number one on the Billboard pop chart. It was her first gold single and was nominated for a Grammy. Even though it was not released as a country song, it was among the first big hits to use what was to become the Nashville sound - a string orchestra and legato harmonized background vocals. "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" got noticed in its third release a few months later, and sales snowballed; the song remains a perennial favorite each December and is the record with which she is most identified by contemporary audiences.

Her last top ten single on the pop charts was 1963's "Losing You" (number 6), while she continued to have other chart songs such as her 1966 song "Coming On Strong" and "Is It True?" in 1964. The latter, featuring Jimmy Page on guitar, was her only hit single recorded in London, England and was produced by Mickie Most.

Lee enjoys one distinction unique among successful American singers; her opening act on a UK tour in the early 1960s was a then-little-known beat group from Liverpool, England: The Beatles

Lee reached the final ballot for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 and 2001 without being inducted, but was voted into the hall for 2002.

Celebrating over 50 years as a recording artist, in September 2006 she was the second recipient of the Jo Meador-Walker Lifetime Achievement award by the Source Foundation in Nashville. In 2007, she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame; and is a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame.

In 2008, her recording of "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" marked 50 years as a holiday standard, and in February 2009, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences gave Lee a Lifetime Achievement Grammy.

This is the original sheet music - not a modern reproduction.