05.26.2020
TODAY WOULD HAVE MARKED THE 100TH BIRTHDAY OF MISS PEGGY LEE.
The 1953 ten-inch album “Black Coffee” was one of the very first
records I heard as a small child. In fact, both “Black Coffee” and
Frank Sinatra’s “Songs For Swingin’ Lovers” contained Cole Porter’s
“I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, so if I happen to hear either of those
renditions, I am immediately eye-to-eye with the glowing red light of
our Decca Deccalian record player, waiting for the next song to play.
I didn’t know what coffee tasted like then but it certainly sounded
good.
Like most children of those times, I adored Peggy Lee’s rendition of
the “Siamese Cat Song” from Disney’s “Lady And The Tramp” but I was
somewhat mortified when this was the very first thing my Dad told Miss
Lee, when we were introduced to her after a terrific club set, during
a trip to New York that my father and I had taken in the mid-1980s.
Needless to say, I was eager to impress upon her that I’d loved her
singing all the more when I grew to be a man, whether it was her
version of “Get Out Of Town” from “Beauty and The Beat” – an album
with George Shearing – or her cool/hot version of “Don’t Smoke In
Bed”.
Then a flashbulb was fired off and I lost my words. The photograph of
the three of us sat proudly on my Dad’s piano to the end of his life.
I wish I had it to show you now.
You probably know that the song, “Fever” was originally a R&B smash by
Little Willie John but it was Peggy Lee who carried it into the hit parade.
Give either of those versions a spin and then add the version by Elvis
Presley and you can pretty much forget about all the other renditions
that have followed over the years. They are less like a “Fever” than a
slight head cold.
I think you’d be better to spend your time with all the great ailment
songs that Little Willie John cut after his first feverish outbreak,
songs like, “My Nerves”, “Spasms” and “I’m Shakin’”
Those were more innocent times.
As great as she was as an interpreter of song, Peggy Lee was also a
fine songwriter in her own right, composing “I Love Being Here With
You”, a tune with which my wife, Diana, often used to open her shows.
Miss Lee was also a great, if under-used actor, receiving an Academy
Award Nomination for her emotionally tough performance in “Pete
Kelly’s Blues”.
The hurt in her voice in blue ballads sometimes sat at odds with the
glamorous pictorial presentation of period album covers with titles
such as, “I Like Men!”.
I think that exclamation mark says it all.
Like a lot of singers who came out of the big-band era, Peggy Lee
sometimes had to make magic out of some pretty trivial songs. The 50s
and 60s also saw a fashion for themed vocal records, so there was
“Latin Ala Lee”, which included “Till There Was You” and “I Enjoy
Being a Girl” and the album “Cross Country Blues”, arranged and
produced by Quincy Jones, with the superb, “Fisherman’s Wharf” and an
extraordinary version of “Basin Street Blues”.
Peggy Lee was a singer of subtle, nuanced readings of mood and lyric,
not given to the scale-running excess of self-conscious jazz singing,
even when accompanied by the finest jazz musicians.
Peggy Lee was always utterly herself at the microphone and therefore
much less ill-at-ease when singing newer song styles that came along.
You won’t hear any of those ill-fitting paisley shirt songs in her
catalogue.
One of Peggy Lee’s most beloved records is her deadpan reading of
Leiber and Stoller’s fatalistic, “Is That All There Is?” and the album
of that name also contains a beautiful rendition of Randy Newman’s
“Love Story”, who also contributed the orchestral arrangements
In 1974, Paul McCartney wrote, arranged and produced, “Let’s Love” for
an album of the same name but the song with which I am going to close
this salute is Peggy Lee’s cool reading of the Ray Davies song, “I Go
To Sleep”.
You probably know the tune from the hit recording by The Pretenders. I
loved the song so much I tried to echo the melody in my song “Kid
About It”. That’s the way it goes with songs; one thing leads to
another.
I hope we don’t have to wait another hundred years for a singer of
such intimacy and beauty of tone to emerge. Thank heaven we have the
voice of Miss Peggy Lee, forever.