Brenda Lee tops the charts at age 78.

She toured with Jerry Lee Lewis during the heat of the 1950s rock’n’roll explosion. “He was a wild man,” she says. “Nobody had seen that kind of energy on stage. He would have people pulling chairs out of the concrete floors in auditoriums.” Helpfully, when Lee went on, the seats were still in place. “I wouldn’t want to have followed him,” she laughs.

Her early fans included Elvis Presley, who loved her mix of rockabilly and country and saw her perform at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. She still treasures a photograph she has of them together. “We had a connection because he wasn’t putting it on,” she says. “He was a poor boy from the south who loved his mama and wanted to do good for her.”

As success blossomed, she toured with Gene Vincent – who was “gentle, but crazy” – and played the Star-Club in Hamburg with the Beatles as the opening act. “I was standing there while waiting to go on and listening to these songs I’d never heard before. When they came off, I asked John Lennon: ‘Where do you get those songs?’ And he said very nonchalantly: ‘Oh, we write them.’ I was flabbergasted and asked if they had a tape I could take to my record company. Of course they turned them down [Decca famously told the Beatles, “Guitar groups are on the way out”], but it was obvious that they were stars.” Lennon later described Lee as “The greatest rock’n’roll voice of them all.”

She remembers Judy Garland told her: “Don’t let them take your childhood.” But Lee insists she was never waylaid by drink, drugs or scandal. “I was around that stuff but I wasn’t in that stuff,” she says, crediting her humble upbringing and “good people” around her for keeping her grounded. “My mama always said: ‘Don’t get above your raisin’.’” Her 60-year marriage to Ronnie Shacklett has helped, too. They married when she was 18, less than six months after first meeting at a Jackie Wilson concert: “I looked across the room and there he sat. My husband to be.” Because she was so young – and at a key stage in her career – her family and management all boycotted the wedding, but the couple (who have two daughters, Jolie and Julie, and three grandchildren) have proved the naysayers wrong. “You work at it, because you love and revere it,” she says. “And it works if you work.”