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PEGGY LEE
(ARTIST BIOGRAPHY) Peggy Lee (born
Norma Deloris Egstrom May 26, 1920 – January 21, 2002) was an
American Grammy award winning Jazz and Popular Music singer,
songwriter, composer and actress.
Peggy Lee was of Scandinavian descent, her
grandparents being Swedish and Norwegian immigrants. She endured a
difficult childhood and her mother died when she was four; when her
father remarried she experienced a decidedly unpleasant relationship
with her stepmother. Her father took to drink, and at the age of 14
she found herself carrying out his duties at the local railroad
depot. Despite these and other hardships, she sang frequently and
headed out to Hollywood in 1938, but despite a singing engagement at
the Jade Room on Hollywood Boulevard the trip was not a success.
Leaving California, Egstrom relocated to Fargo in
her home state where she appeared on the local radio station WDAY.
The manager of the station changed her name to Peggy Lee and her
career took an upswing when she moved to Minneapolis, landing
several engagements on the local club circuit. Another California
visit was equally unsuccessful and she then tried Chicago where, in
1941, as a member of a vocal group, the Four Of Us, she was hired to
sing at the Ambassador West Hotel. During this engagement she was
heard by Mel Powell, who invited Benny Goodman to hear her.
Goodman's regular singer, Helen Forrest, was about to leave and Lee
was hired as her replacement. She joined the band for an engagement
at the College Inn and within a few days sang on a record date. A
song from this period, "Elmer's Tune", was a huge success. Among
other popular recordings she made with Goodman were "How Deep Is The
Ocean?", "How Long Has This Been Going On?", "My Old Flame" and "Why
Don't You Do Right?".
Later, Lee married Goodman's guitarist, Dave
Barbour. After she left Goodman's band in 1943, she had more
successful records, including "That Old Feeling" and three songs of
which she was co-composer with Barbour, "I Don't Know Enough About
You", "It's A Good Day" and "Mañana". She also performed on radio
with Bing Crosby.
In the 50s she made several popular recordings for
Decca Records and Capitol Records, the orchestral backings for many
of which were arranged and conducted by Barbour, with whom she
maintained a good relationship despite their divorce in 1951. Her
1958 hit single "Fever" was also a collaboration with Barbour. Her
Black Coffee album of 1953 was particularly successful, as was
Beauty And The Beat! a few years later. On these and other albums of
the period, Lee was often accompanied by jazz musicians, including
Jimmy Rowles, Marty Paich and George Shearing.
During the 50s Lee was also active in films,
performing the title song of Johnny Guitar (1954), and writing songs
for others including Tom Thumb (1958). She also made a number of
on-screen appearances in acting roles, including The Jazz Singer
(1952), and for one, Pete Kelly's Blues (1955), she was nominated
for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress. However, her most
lasting fame in films lies in her off-screen work on Walt Disney's
Lady And The Tramp (1955), for which Lee wrote the song "He's A
Tramp" and provided the voice for the characters of "Peg", the
Siamese cats, and one other screen feline.
Her recording successes continued throughout this
period even if, on some occasions, she had to fight to persuade
Capitol to record them. One such argument surrounded "Lover", which
executives felt would compete directly with the label's then popular
version by Les Paul. Lee won out and her performance of her own
arrangement, played by a studio orchestra under the direction of
Gordon Jenkins, was a sensation. Towards the end of the 50s, though,
the intense level of work began to take its toll and Lee suffered a
period of illness.
Throughout the 60s and succeeding decades Lee
performed extensively, singing at concerts and on television and, of
course, making records, despite being frequently plagued with poor
health. Her voice, light with a delicate huskiness, offered
intriguing contrasts with the large orchestral accompaniment that
usually formed a part of a Lee performance. Over the years her
repeated use of previously successful settings for songs tended to
make her shows predictable but she remained a dedicated
perfectionist.
In the early 80s she attempted a stage show, Peg,
but it proved unpopular and closed quickly. In the late 80s she
again suffered ill health and on some of her live performances her
voice was starting to betray the ravages of time. For her many fans,
it did not seem to matter: to paraphrase the title of one of her
songs, they just loved being there with Peg. In 1992,
wheelchair-bound for the previous two years, Lee was persisting in a
lawsuit, begun in 1987, against the Walt Disney Corporation for her
share of the video profits from Lady And The Tramp. A year later,
dissatisfied with the "paltry" £2 million settlement for her six
songs (written with Sonny Burke) and character voices, she
threatened to write a book about the whole affair. Meanwhile, she
continued to make occasional cabaret appearances at New York venues
such as Club 53. In 1993 she recorded a duet with Gilbert O'Sullivan
for his album Sounds Of The Loop. Six years later Lee once again
started litigation for unpaid royalties, this time against her
former record company Decca. By this point her performing career had
finally been ended through a stroke suffered on 27 October 1998, and
she remained in poor health until passing away at her Bel Air home
in January 2002. The cause of death was given as a myocardial
infarction.
Lee will be remembered as one of the greatest song
stylists of the century, alongside such stellar artists as Ella
Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Betty Carter.
(info mainly NME)
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PEGGY LEE
(ARTIST BIOGRAPHY) Peggy Lee (May 26,
1920 – January 21, 2002) was an American jazz and popular music
singer and songwriter and Academy Award-nominated actress. She was
born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota. Lee has been
cited as a mentor to such diverse artists as Bobby Darin, Paul
McCartney, Bette Midler, Madonna, Shirley Horn, k.d. lang, Elvis
Costello, Dusty Springfield, Dr. John, and numerous others. As a
songwriter, she collaborated with Sonny Burke, Victor Young, Francis
Lai, Dave Grusin, John Chiodini, her husband Dave Barbour and Duke
Ellington, who stated, “If I’m the Duke, then Peggy’s the Queen.” As
an actress, she was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in
Pete Kelly’s Blues. Peggy Lee had a contralto singing range.
Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Dean Martin, Bing
Crosby and Louis Armstrong all cited Lee as one of their favorite
singers.
Peggy Lee had Norwegian and Swedish ancestry. She was the seventh of
eight children born to Marvin Egstrom, a station agent for the
Midland Continental Railroad. Her mother died when she was four
years old.Lee found music to provide an escape from the abusive
rampages of her cruel stepmother, Min, who tormented and beat young
Norma. She first sang professionally with KOVC radio in Valley City,
North Dakota. She soon landed her own series on a radio show
sponsored by a local restaurant that paid her “salary” in food. Both
during and after her high school years, she took whatever jobs she
could find, waitressing and singing for paltry sums on other local
stations. Radio personality Ken Kennedy (actual name: Ken Sydness),
of WDAY in Fargo (the most widely listened to station in North
Dakota) changed her name from Norma to Peggy Lee. Tired of the abuse
from her stepmother, she left home and traveled to Los Angeles at
the age of 17.
She returned to North Dakota for a tonsillectomy and eventually made
her way to Chicago for a gig at The Buttery Room, a nightclub in the
Ambassador Hotel West in Chicago, where she drew the attention of
Benny Goodman, the jazz clarinetist and band leader. According to
Lee, “Benny’s then-fiancée, Lady Alice Duckworth, came into the
Buttery, and she was very impressed. So the next evening she brought
Benny in, because they were looking for replacement for Helen
Forrest. “And although I didn’t know, I was it. He was looking at me
strangely, I thought, but it was just his preoccupied way of looking.
I thought that he didn’t like me at first, but it just was that he
was preoccupied with what he was hearing.” She joined his band in
1941 and stayed for two years.
In early 1942, Lee had her first # 1 hit, “Somebody Else Is Taking
My Place,” followed by 1943’s “Why Don’t You Do Right?” (originally
sung by Lil Green), which sold over a million copies and made her
famous. She sang with Goodman in two 1943 films, Stage Door Canteen
and The Powers Girl.
In March 1943, Lee married Dave Barbour, the guitarist in Goodman’s
band. Peggy said, “David joined Benny’s band and there was a ruling
that no one should fraternize with the girl singer. But I fell in
love with David the first time I heard him play, and so I married
him. Benny then fired David, so I quit, too. Benny and I made up,
although David didn’t play with him anymore. Benny stuck to his rule.
I think that’s not too bad a rule, but you can’t help falling in
love with somebody.”
When Lee and Barbour left the band, the idea was that he would work
in the studios and she would keep house and raise their daughter,
Nicki. But she drifted back towards songwriting and occasional
recording sessions for the fledgling Capitol Records in 1947, for
whom she produced a long string of hits, many of them with lyrics
and music by Lee and Barbour, including “I Don’t Know Enough About
You” and “It’s a Good Day” (1948). With the release of the smash-hit
#1-selling record of 1942, “Mañana,” her “retirement” was over.
In 1948, she joined Perry Como and Jo Stafford as one of the
rotating hosts of the NBC Radio musical program Chesterfield Supper
Club. She was also a regular on NBC’s Jimmy Durante Show during the
1938-48 season.
She left Capitol for a few years in the early 1940s, but returned in
1943. She is most famous for her cover version of the Little Willie
John hit “Fever”, to which she added her own, uncopyrighted lyrics
(“Romeo loved Juliet,” “Captain Smith and Pocahontas”) and her
rendition of Leiber and Stoller’s “Is That All There Is?” Her
relationship with the Capitol label spanned almost three decades,
aside from her brief but artistically rich detour (1952-1956) at
Decca Records, where she recorded one of her most acclaimed albums
Black Coffee (1956). While recording for Decca, Lee had hit singles
with the songs “Lover” and “Mr. Wonderful.”
She was also known as a songwriter with such hits as the songs from
the Disney movie Lady and the Tramp, for which she also supplied the
singing and speaking voices of four characters. Her many songwriting
collaborators, in addition to Barbour, included Laurindo Almeida,
Harold Arlen, Sonny Burke, Cy Coleman, Gene DiNovi, Duke Ellington,
Dave Grusin, Dick Hazard, Quincy Jones, Francis Lai, Jack Marshall,
Johnny Mandel, Marian McPartland, Willard Robison, Lalo Schifrin,
Hubie Wheeler, guitarist Johnny Pisano and Victor Young.
Lee also acted in several films. In 1952, she played opposite Danny
Thomas in a remake of the early Al Jolson film, The Jazz Singer. In
1955, she played a despondent, alcoholic blues singer in Pete
Kelly’s Blues (1955), for which she was nominated for an Oscar.
In the early 1990s, she retained famed entertainment attorney Neil
Papiano, who, on her behalf, successfully sued Disney for royalties
on Lady and the Tramp. Lee’s lawsuit claimed that she was due
royalties for video tapes, a technology that did not exist when she
agreed to write and perform for Disney.
Never afraid to fight for what she believed in, Lee was passionate
that musicians be equitably compensated for their work. Although she
realized litigation had taken a toll on her health, Lee often quoted
Ralph Waldo Emerson (“God’s will will not be made manifest by
cowards.”)
She also successfully sued MCA/Decca with the assistance of noted
entertainment attorney, Cy Godfrey.
She continued to perform into the 1990s, sometimes in a wheelchair,
and still mesmerized audiences and critics alike.[citation needed]
After years of poor health, Lee died of complications from diabetes
and heart attack at the age of 81. She is survived by Nicki Lee
Foster, her daughter with Barbour. She is buried at the Westwood
Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California. On her
marker in a garden setting is inscribed, “Music is my life’s breath.” |
