Miss Peggy Lee : 'The Spirit Of Film Song'
Jun 29, 2019 20:43:55 GMT
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Post by petrolino on Jun 29, 2019 20:43:55 GMT
Peggy Lee
'Don't Smoke In Bed'
"Peggy Lee was born Norma Egstrom in 1920 in the small town of Jamestown, North Dakota, and she developed a fondness for singing, writing tunes, and the radio at a young age. By the time she was a teenager, she had found a job singing at the local radio station, and eventually adopted the more marketable pseudonym Peggy Lee.
Her quest for fame brought her first to Los Angeles, and eventually to Chicago, where she got a job singing at the Ambassador Hotel West. It was there that she was discovered by the wife of bandleader Benny Goodman, who knew his husband’s orchestra was looking for someone to replace singer Helen Forrest. Peggy Lee got the job. Her bluesy and sensuous voice would add a different dimension to Goodman’s band, rocketing her to fame in 1943 with songs like “Blues In The Night” and “Why Don’t You Do Right.”
However, Lee didn’t stay in Goodman’s band for long, not because of her desire for bigger and better things, but because she was fraternizing with one band member in particular, guitarist Dave Barbour. Goodman had strict rules about romance within the group, so both Barbour and Lee left the group in 1943 to get married start a family."
Her quest for fame brought her first to Los Angeles, and eventually to Chicago, where she got a job singing at the Ambassador Hotel West. It was there that she was discovered by the wife of bandleader Benny Goodman, who knew his husband’s orchestra was looking for someone to replace singer Helen Forrest. Peggy Lee got the job. Her bluesy and sensuous voice would add a different dimension to Goodman’s band, rocketing her to fame in 1943 with songs like “Blues In The Night” and “Why Don’t You Do Right.”
However, Lee didn’t stay in Goodman’s band for long, not because of her desire for bigger and better things, but because she was fraternizing with one band member in particular, guitarist Dave Barbour. Goodman had strict rules about romance within the group, so both Barbour and Lee left the group in 1943 to get married start a family."
- Mark Chilla, Afterglow : Jazz And American Popular Song
"Today, it is almost the norm for singers to write their own songs, but in the 1940s when there was a proliferation of music coming out of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood, it was not. Not until Peggy Lee, who was the first famous singer-songwriter. She began writing songs in earnest with her husband, guitarist Dave Barbour. One of her first songs, “What More Can a Woman Do?”, written in 1945, was soon recorded by another young singer named Sarah Vaughan. Sarah recorded this with some guys named Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. This song also became the album title and hit R&B single for another great singer, Big Maybelle.
Peggy’s first big songwriting hits, in 1946, were “I Don’t Know Enough About You” and “It’s a Good Day,” which was later used as one of the opening numbers in the Susan Hayward film, With a Song in My Heart, about the life of singer Jane Froman. Then in 1948 she wrote “Mañana,” which topped the charts for nine weeks and was Capitol Records’ biggest hit single by a singer-songwriter until the Beatles (and then it took four men!).
In the 1950s, while continuing to write hit singles, she began writing for motion pictures. In 1952, Peggy wrote “How Strange,” her first song for a motion picture, the Robert Stack/Virginia Grey movie The Bullfighter and the Lady."
Peggy’s first big songwriting hits, in 1946, were “I Don’t Know Enough About You” and “It’s a Good Day,” which was later used as one of the opening numbers in the Susan Hayward film, With a Song in My Heart, about the life of singer Jane Froman. Then in 1948 she wrote “Mañana,” which topped the charts for nine weeks and was Capitol Records’ biggest hit single by a singer-songwriter until the Beatles (and then it took four men!).
In the 1950s, while continuing to write hit singles, she began writing for motion pictures. In 1952, Peggy wrote “How Strange,” her first song for a motion picture, the Robert Stack/Virginia Grey movie The Bullfighter and the Lady."
- Sean Connors, Medium Rare Records
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'Why Don't You Do Right' - Peggy Lee & the Benny Goodman Orchestra
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A small selection from the countless many Peggy Lee songs and recordings (ie. interpretations) that have graced the movies up until this point in time ...
- - - -
'How Strange' (written by Peggy Lee & Victor Young)
Robert Stack & Gilbert Roland in 'Bullfighter And The Lady' (1951 - Budd Boetticher)
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'Johnny Guitar' (written by Peggy Lee & Victor Young)
Joan Crawford in 'Johnny Guitar' (1954 - Nicholas Ray)
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'Bella Notte' (written by Sonny Burke & Peggy Lee)
'The Lady And The Tramp' (1955 - Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske)
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'The Gypsy With The Fire In His Shoes' (written by Laurindo Almeida & Peggy Lee)
Colleen Miller & Tony Curtis in 'The Rawhide Years' (1956 - Rudolph Mate)
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'The Shining Sea' (written by Peggy Lee & Johnny Mandel)
Alan Arkin in 'The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming' (1966 - Norman Jewison)
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'The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter' (written by Dave Grusin & Peggy Lee)
Alan Arkin & Sondra Locke in 'The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter' (1968 - Robert Ellis Miller)
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'There'll Be Another Spring' (written by Peggy Lee & Herbie Wheeler)
Jimmy Fallon & Christina Ricci in 'Anything Else' (2003 - Woody Allen)
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"She knows what an exalted thing it is to be alive", the singer Sylvia Syms once said of Peggy Lee. For all we can tell, she may know it still, since few spirits could be better prepared by natural grace, airy buoyancy, sensitivity to ambience and hipness to fundamental harmonies to survive in whatever imaginable dimension the departed might be obliged to navigate.
A great American popular singer, of wit, sensuality, intelligence and extraordinarily expressive minimalism, Lee was a singer that let her audiences breathe. Syms compared her presence onstage to witnessing the soft vibration of a reed, except that Lee was too real a woman in every respect to be characterised by such fragility. Countless fans, and countless singers - from the unknown to the most revered - hung on her every nuance, and vocal artists from the late Frank Sinatra to kd lang and Elvis Costello quote her work as an inspiration.
Unlike Ella Fitzgerald, who made the most astonishing vocal acrobatics sound as easy as singing in the bath, Peggy Lee was not an outwardly artless singer. She cultivated every move she made on stage, from the curl of a lip to the arch of an eyebrow, to the breathily receding resolving note of a song - and it all showed, you couldn't be fooled that this stuff happened because she had just thought of it. Yet if it was an act, it was an act that mesmerised by its versatility, and went deep because it was enacted in the service of life and not simply ego.
"To see a fine actress build a convincing characterisation in the 90 minutes of a movie is impressive enough", the American commentator Gene Lees wrote. "But to see Peggy Lee build 15 characterisations in the course of an hour is one of the most impressive things I've seen." The act was applied to such a simple palette of sounds, to such an unerring choice of songs, and to such a close connection with the most shared and familiar desires and fears in her audiences, that it never seemed like artifice - more like a quietly ritualistic celebration of the contradictions, exhilarations and ironies of being alive.
Lee's ironic side is what has distanced her from all the torch singers who pop buttons with the effort of proving how deeply they empathise with the emotions of a song, and how urgently they desire to share it. She chose a louche, resigned, seen-it-all persona for one of her best-known songs, Is That All There Is?, and even the heated atmosphere of Fever, virtually her signature tune, has an underlying suggestion that the person raising the temperature for her right now doesn't have to be the one doing it next week.
Peggy Lee could suggest the girl down the street, but - as has often been remarked of her - the one who moved up from the country, learned a thing or two hard and fast, but just got wiser on the knowledge rather than resigned to staring into the bottom of a glass. These achievements all testified to Lee's intelligence and awareness of a world outside her dressing room. She extended her explorations to poetry, writing (including screenplays) painting, fabric and card design, and humanitarian work for a variety of charities and non-profit organisations, women's groups particularly."
A great American popular singer, of wit, sensuality, intelligence and extraordinarily expressive minimalism, Lee was a singer that let her audiences breathe. Syms compared her presence onstage to witnessing the soft vibration of a reed, except that Lee was too real a woman in every respect to be characterised by such fragility. Countless fans, and countless singers - from the unknown to the most revered - hung on her every nuance, and vocal artists from the late Frank Sinatra to kd lang and Elvis Costello quote her work as an inspiration.
Unlike Ella Fitzgerald, who made the most astonishing vocal acrobatics sound as easy as singing in the bath, Peggy Lee was not an outwardly artless singer. She cultivated every move she made on stage, from the curl of a lip to the arch of an eyebrow, to the breathily receding resolving note of a song - and it all showed, you couldn't be fooled that this stuff happened because she had just thought of it. Yet if it was an act, it was an act that mesmerised by its versatility, and went deep because it was enacted in the service of life and not simply ego.
"To see a fine actress build a convincing characterisation in the 90 minutes of a movie is impressive enough", the American commentator Gene Lees wrote. "But to see Peggy Lee build 15 characterisations in the course of an hour is one of the most impressive things I've seen." The act was applied to such a simple palette of sounds, to such an unerring choice of songs, and to such a close connection with the most shared and familiar desires and fears in her audiences, that it never seemed like artifice - more like a quietly ritualistic celebration of the contradictions, exhilarations and ironies of being alive.
Lee's ironic side is what has distanced her from all the torch singers who pop buttons with the effort of proving how deeply they empathise with the emotions of a song, and how urgently they desire to share it. She chose a louche, resigned, seen-it-all persona for one of her best-known songs, Is That All There Is?, and even the heated atmosphere of Fever, virtually her signature tune, has an underlying suggestion that the person raising the temperature for her right now doesn't have to be the one doing it next week.
Peggy Lee could suggest the girl down the street, but - as has often been remarked of her - the one who moved up from the country, learned a thing or two hard and fast, but just got wiser on the knowledge rather than resigned to staring into the bottom of a glass. These achievements all testified to Lee's intelligence and awareness of a world outside her dressing room. She extended her explorations to poetry, writing (including screenplays) painting, fabric and card design, and humanitarian work for a variety of charities and non-profit organisations, women's groups particularly."
- John Fordham, The Guardian
Peggy Lee & Paul McCartney
