Born Norma Jean Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, Peggy Lee (1920-2002) had her first professional singing experience sing on local radio shows, for which we she was occasionally paid in free food by the restaurant sponsor. Lee sang in the Doll House in Palm Springs and then The Buttery Room in Chicago, where she impressed Benny Goodman employ her as a replacement for Helen Forrest. In her two years with Goodman, she made her first recordings. She encouraged the bandleader to try the minor blues song, ‘Why Don’t You Do Right?’. Recorded in 1942, it sold over a million copies, and they also performed it in the 1943 film ‘Stage Door Canteen’. During this time she and the band’s guitarist Dave Barbour got married, and decided to move to Los Angeles, which ended both their time with Goodman. Lee turned down the copious job offers that followed the success of her first hit, while she raised her daughter and she and Barbour started to write songs in earnest, and then record them with a pickup band at Capitol Records. ‘I Don’t Know Enough About You’, ‘It’s A Good Day’ and ‘Mañana’ all come from 1946-7. The last of these was another number one hit, and it proved impossible for Lee to continue her period of ‘retirement’.
She found herself much in demand for radio work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She starred in the 1952 remake of The Jazz Singer, and more memorably in Pete Kelly’s Blues from 1955, which brought her an Oscar nomination. In the same year, she also wrote songs for, and sang on, the soundtrack of Disney’s Lady And The Tramp. ‘He’s A Tramp’, written with composer Sonny Burke, has since been recorded by Bette Midler, Liza Minnelli and Dianne Reeves among many others.
The mid-1950s was also when she recorded a string of classic albms, including Black Coffee, Dream Street and The Man I Love. She had further million seller singles with ‘Lover’ from 1952 and ‘Fever from 1958. An album with George Shearing in 1959 ‘Beauty and the Beat’ was recorded in the studio, but turned into a fake ‘live’ album with canned applause and announcements. Fortunately the music is good enough to survive the editing, with songs like Duke Ellington’s ‘All Too Soon’ and Cole Porter’s ‘Do I Love You’ among the highlights. Further strong albums for Capitol Records came in the 1960s, culminating in ‘Is That All There’ from 1969, the title track (by Leiber and Stoller) winning Lee her first Grammy. The album features arrangements by Randy Newman, with another standout track being Willard Robison’s ‘Don’t Smoke In Bed’. Lee continued to record and to tour into the 1990s. She died in 2002 after some years of poor health.
Key Recordings:
Black Coffee (Decca 1953)
Beauty And The Beat! (Capitol 1959)
Is That All There Is (Capitol 1969)