Peggy Lee: An Overlooked Jazz and Pop Singer
PEGGY LEE, the singer, was born in Jamestown, North Dakota in 1920 as Norma Deloris Egstrom. Her family was Swedish-American. Her father was a railroad worker with a drinking problem. Norma’s mother was gone and her stepmother was frightening and physically abusive. Shy and insecure, Norma withdrew, living in her head.
She wrote poetry, enjoyed a certain success as a coquette but was painfully aware that this was not real power. Her mind ruled her, at times with a blazing intensity. She was overly critical of herself, her hometown, and of North Dakota. There had to be more to life than this.
A natural mimic, she learned as a young girl that people enjoyed her impersonations. It was just a step further to start singing, which she found an ideal way to mask her insecurities, her fear and her pain. She loved to listen to swing music on the radio, and thought vaguely of writing songs, singing on stage, being a star. Still, it all seemed very unlikely.
Under that shy, dreamy exterior was great determination and drive. She believed that we are all unique, and must be self-reliant. Determined to escape her unhappy home, by the age of 14, in the heart of the Great Depression, she was 96 miles east of Jamestown, waitressing and wangling her way into Fargo radio station WDAY, where she convinced the management she could sing. That’s when her voice first started going over the airwaves.
It was a long seven years from age 14 to 21, traveling through the Midwest, singing wherever she could, returning to Fargo in the lean times, singing in supper clubs while oblivious patrons kept chattering. Singing in coffee shops. During those years, she left Norma Egstrom behind and became “Peggy Lee.”
In the summer of 1941, at age 21, Peggy Lee got her first big break. She was singing in the Buttery Room of the Ambassador West Hotel in Chicago when Benny Goodman walked in. Goodman and his band were staying at the hotel, and were about to lose their singer, Helen Forrest. Impressed by Peggy Lee, Goodman asked if she’d like to be lead singer in his jazz band. She jumped at the chance.
Near the end of the Big Band Era, she spent a grueling two years on the road with Goodman and his band, one of the very best. She was learning all the time. Chicago to Minneapolis, out to California and back to Chicago again. Singing constantly, but never sleeping enough. Irregular meals. Having to wash and dry her long blonde hair without a hairdryer. Trying to fend off men, especially hard when they might have leverage over her career.
Benny Goodman didn’t particularly like female singers; he called them “canaries” and carried them in his act for commercial reasons only. But if he was a little cold to Peggy at first, he could see her talent, and he gave her pop tunes to sing when she proved she could handle them.
Goodman’s pianist Mel Powell was nicer and more helpful, and Peggy improved her singing a great deal. She already had excellent rhythm and pitch. She had confidence and could “swing.” What she perfected with Goodman’s band was how to use the microphone, how to think about musical phrasing, and how to enunciate clearly while singing about confusion and loss.
Like Dusty Springfield, the shyness and insecurity that Peggy Lee felt came across as flirtatious and soulful on stage. She absorbed some of the vocal technique of blues and R&B singers she heard, and people who heard Peggy on the radio sometimes thought she was African-American. She learned to sing jazz by listening to Billie Holiday and Maxine Sullivan, and her voice was a jazz instrument, bright and colorful one moment and sad and muted the next.
When Peggy sang “Crazy, He Calls Me” or “When The World Was Young,” she borrowed Billie Holiday’s phrasings, and she could do a Billie Holiday imitation that was so good it was eerie. But it WAS an imitation — “That’s not me,” she would quickly add. To her, pure imitation was something for children; a mature artist always adds something distinctly their own.
Her own voice was softer than Billie’s — full of yearning and regret, as if she was longing for something she couldn’t have.
She performed with an edge, shifting her shoulders as she sang, playing with the audience, her eagerness mixed with great control. You always felt Peggy had more on her mind than she could sing, that the song was only a glimmer of what she was. Stephen Holden has written: “Her soft, stealthy voice always lingering behind the beat, hinted at secrets that could never be revealed.”
Dance bands were then the most popular music in the country, and in 1943, Peggy’s rendition of “Why Don’t You Do It Right?” made her famous.
Then she left the band.
In 1942, Peggy married the guitarist Dave Barbour and for a time they were happy. They had a daughter, Nicki, and wrote some fine songs together, like “Manana” (“Tomorrow”) in 1947 and “It’s a Good Day,” and “I Don’t Know Enough About You. ” In 1947–1948, “Manana” spent 9 weeks as the #1 song in the United States.
But Barbour drank too much and in 1951 the marriage crumbled. Peggy Lee married three more times but none of the marriages lasted. She had a passionate affair with the singer Robert Preston, but he was married.
In 1952, she made the recording “Lover.” In 1957, she made the album “The Man I Love.” In 1958, she had a hit with “Fever” with an arrangement she wrote herself. She was still powerful in a small club, and a reviewer who heard her in 1953 at La Vie En Rose in Manhattan wrote, “If you don’t feel a thrill when Peggy sings, you’re dead, Jack.” But rock and roll came along in the 1950’s, and it scared her. She said later, “I thought the sky had fallen.” Another blow came when Billie Holiday died of heart failure in 1959, only 44 years old.
Through the 1960’s, Peggy Lee kept on singing and touring. She had too much pride and determination to crumble or give way. She wanted another hit, and was searching for that special song that could put her back on top again.
In 1968, she heard an acetate of “Is That All There Is?” a song with a curious history. It had begun as a Thomas Mann short story in 1896; its tune and words had been written by the hit-makers Leiber & Stoller, who crafted “Hound Dog,” and “Love Potion #9”; but it was arranged like a Kurt Weill number, with the piano quite prominent, and the words half-spoken, half-sung.
More curious was how relentlessly downbeat the song was. It began with the singer recalling being six years old, her childhood house on fire, shivering outside in her pajamas, watching her home burn, and thinking ‘Is that all there is to a fire?’ In verse two, the singer recalls going to the circus at age 12, and thinking ‘Is that all there is to a circus?’ while the other children marvel at the elephants, acrobats and clowns. In the third verse, it’s adult love that disappoints the singer, and the song ends with the singer’s death — the final disappointment.
“Is That All There Is?” became personal for Peggy, perhaps because she recalled so vividly her profound disappointment with Jamestown, North Dakota, and with love.
What a downer of a song, everyone told Peggy. She insisted she wanted to record the song, and played demos of it to people close to her. Nobody liked the demo, not her manager, not the producer at Capitol Records. They wanted a “hit,” something “contemporary,” with a modern arrangement and a breezy idealism.
Finally, Peggy had to go to Glenn Wallichs, one of the founders of Capitol Records, to ask his permission to record the song, an errand she found a touch humiliating. Wallichs was embarrassed that a star on his label was on her way down, and not in synch with her producer. Wallichs was also chagrined that Peggy Lee had made so much money for his company in the past, and now was being stiffed like this.
He said, ‘If you want to record it, go ahead.’
She did — and no one at Capitol liked the result. They said ‘It’s too long.’ They said ‘It’s too weird.’ They told her it would only hurt her career to release this particular song so they were going to do her a favor and not release it.
Finally, both Capitol and her manager wanted her to do a TV show, and Peggy agreed only if Capitol would release “Is That All There is?” They released the song and it became a big hit — so much so that it overshadowed the great songs of her youth: songs like “Ain’t Goin’ No Place,” “Crazy, He Calls Me,” and “When the World Was Young.”
Peggy was a friend and lover of Frank Sinatra and, like Sinatra, felt that a singer’s old albums were not enough; singers had to stay relevant, to keep touring, keep recording, stay in the public eye. Always, Peggy Lee had that great drive, insecurity and perfectionism.
Her later years were hard in certain ways. Friends urged her to retire, settle down, be Norma Egstrom again — but Peggy would say ‘You don’t retire, you can’t.’ The music was in her and all her best moments were up on stage. Norma Egstrom no longer existed.
At times, she drove herself to the point of collapse and then took to bed for long periods, getting dubious medical treatments. Anxious and tense, she relied too much on alcohol and tranquilizers to get through everyday life, and had a sad collapse while performing at the Nixon White House. She got into a long legal wrangle with Walt Disney Corporation. Too often, she was what she’d sung about so beautifully — “A Woman Alone With the Blues.”
When Peggy Lee died in 2002, she still had thousands of devoted fans and admirers. She loved the fact that a great many of her fans had become friends of each other, simply from having seen each other at so many Peggy Lee concerts. But most of those fans were older, and every year more of them die.
Today, the name “Peggy Lee” is rarely spoken by younger music fans, who tend to ignore jazz and to be dubious of white jazz singers. “Manana” has become controversial; arranged and sung in a “Latin” style, it seems to play on an ugly stereotype that Latin people aren’t willing or able to face their problems today.
Peggy hated the idea that any song of hers could be racist. She loved Mexico and its people. Despite her individual gifts and her solitary mindset, she felt there’s too much “individualism” in the world, and we forget that we are all one, a collective.
She was sure that much of the magic of popular music is in the way it brings us together, holds us, and powerfully reminds us of the collective.