Brenda Lee was only eight years old when her father died, leaving her family with nothing. By the age of ten, she was the main breadwinner, singing in local venues for $35 a night in rural Georgia. At twelve, she recorded “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree,” a song that would make her, 65 years later, the oldest artist ever to top the Billboard Hot 100. Her rise was meteoric.
By eighteen, she had performed at the Grand Ole Opry, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and outsold her contemporaries across three continents. Yet she was completely exhausted by the music industry built around her. In November 1962, Brenda attended a concert as a fan, not a performer. There, she met Ronnie Shacklett, a young man from a stable Nashville family, far removed from the pressures of her world.
She kept the relationship a secret for three months before telling anyone. When she finally informed her family and management, their reaction was not supportive. Despite the objections of her family and her manager, Brenda married Ronnie on April 24, 1963, in a quiet Nashville ceremony. She was 18.
None of her family attended. Ronnie was not part of the music industry. He had no professional agenda, offering Brenda something she had never known: a stable, private life. He later built his own business restoring fire-damaged homes, giving the family financial independence from the music business.
Brenda’s childhood had been marked by both enormous success and personal hardship. Even as her songs topped the charts, she, her mother, and her siblings lived in a trailer on $75 a month, because her earnings were locked in a trust under the California Child Actor’s Law. The family was only able to move into a proper home after a lawsuit gave them more access to her money. After the British Invasion slowed her pop career, Brenda successfully reinvented herself as a country artist.
In 1974, she survived emergency surgery for serious blood clots. She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1997 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, becoming the first woman inducted into both. In 2023, at age 78, her childhood recording of “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree” finally reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, making her the oldest artist to achieve that milestone.
Through all these ups and downs, her marriage to Ronnie remained constant. They built a life together in Nashville, raising two daughters and welcoming three grandchildren.