1961 saw Brenda Lee consolidating the successes of the previous year by continuing much in the same way: touring and making TV and promotional appearances while scheduling two albums a year and a new 45 every three months. As a force in the business, the team of Brenda Lee and manager/mentor Dub Allbritten was now second only to Elvis and the Colonel in terms of prestige and accomplishment.
Decca's Owen Bradley played an equally important role on the recording side. Both he and Allbritten were staunchly conservative in their approach, and with her mother usually closely on hand, Brenda was as compliant as she was professional. When the trade journal Billboard published a supplement celebrating Brenda's ten-year career in 1966, it noted:
We found Brenda's personal life refreshingly ordinary, well-rounded and, consequently, rather uninteresting there are none of those scandals that make for good copy but bad lives. In this area, high tribute must be paid to Dub Allbritten for taking great pains to avoid ending up with the product of a warped childhood. And Dub believes this pays off in the long run, on the professional side. 'In order to be a well-rounded performer,' Allbritten told the magazine, 'you must be a well-rounded human being. We have been very cautious about not letting the business interfere with her life.'"
