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As a lifelong Peggy Lee fan, I'd like to post the following about her.


Peggy Lee
A Renaissance Woman With A Conscience


Peggy Lee's contributions to American music - not only as a singer but also as a lyricist, composer and musical innovator - exemplify popular music at its best through the eras of jazz, blues, swing, Latin and rock. Her star has never diminished and through the years Miss Lee's music has touched the soul of millions throughout the world.

She has recorded over 650 songs and 60 + albums, many which have become gold records. She appears throughout the world to standing room only audiences. Her many talents and humanitarian endeavors have provided her with countless citations, including the New York Film Critic's Award, an Academy Award "Oscar" nomination, numerous citations from the Cancer Society, the Heart Fund, the National Brotherhood of Christians and Jews, among hundreds of others.

Many will remember her great classic hits, "Why Don't You Do Right?", "Big Spender", "Fever", "Lover , 99 "Manana", and "Is That All There is?", to name but a few of her memorable hits. Currently in release is the Disney Production of "Lady And The Tramp", for which Peggy Lee wrote many of the original songs and played several of the animal characters.

Besides her many musical talents, Peggy Lee is a poet, screenwriter, author, fabric and greeting card designer, painter and humanitarian. She often donates her artistic works for auction for non-profit organizations. This multi-faceted, loving, kind and spiritual woman is currently writing her life story.

Peggy Lee presented a benefit concert for Women's International Center, raising sufficient funds for WIC to establish the Peggy Lee Music Scholarship to help musicians in time of need and for education.

Her humanitarian and professional efforts continue, benefiting thousands. Now 70+ and in a wheelchair due to a fall, the indomitable Peggy Lee is still writing songs, books, poems and, to everyone's delight, and still performing in concert around the world.

In 1994, Peggy returned to help present the Living Legacy Award to the great Ginger Rogers. She is a friend, indeed, to Women's International Center and many others.

Peggy Lee

The singer best known for Fever and Is That All There Is?, she was also an accomplished actress and composer.

John Fordham
Tuesday January 22, 2002
The Guardian


"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, who has died aged 81, 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.

Peggy Lee was born Norma Delores Egstrom in the North Dakota farm town of Jamestown, the daughter of Marvin and Selma Egstrom, the former a Scandinavian immigrant railroad worker. But she was raised by a stepmother in a relationship from which she was anxious to escape, and as a teenager her statuesque appearance and emerging musical talent convinced her she could get work as a singer. Norma Delores went to Hollywood as soon as she left high school, but the competition was hard and she quickly returned to North Dakota. She acquired the name Peggy Lee while working for the WDAY radio station in Fargo (as a singing character called Freckle-Faced Gertie among other things). Work with the swing bands of Jack Wardlaw and Will Osborne brought opportunities for solo work in nightclubs.

The Doll House in Palm Springs was the place Lee credited with forming her characteristically oblique and whispery singing style, an approach she adopted with startling boldness for her age. Finding she couldn't be heard above the noise in the place, she dropped her volume to make the audience wonder what they were missing, and found that it worked - a method that still works like a charm for a young contemporary swing singer like Diana Krall today. Lee was later to say that she liked conversing with audiences in music, and since most people don't like being shouted at, it seemed to make sense to quieten down. By the late 30s, she was beginning to find work with smaller bands around the country, on the West Coast, in Minneapolis and Chicago. But her break came with superstar bandleader and five-star martinet Benny Goodman.

Goodman was not much of a respecter of female singers. Like many jazz bandleaders of the day, he resented the commercial fact that they brought in a general audience and helped swing to stay at the forefront of the popular taste. But he was recommended to hear Lee singing at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago in 1941, shortly before the departure of his vocalist Helen Forrest, cracking under the strain of Goodman's demanding manner.

Lee knew Goodman was in the audience, and was petrified. But Goodman liked her, and in the years between 1941 and 1943 when she worked with him, this ferociously perfectionist bandleader was never less than considerate to her, by her own account. Lee also credited 20 months with such a skilful jazz orchestra to have had an incalculable influence on her phrasing and technique.

With Goodman, Lee sounded bluesier than some of the band's earlier singers had been - increasingly enhancing her essentially narrow-compass voice with slurs and distortions of pitch borrowed from the instrumentalists - but she also delivered in a more flowing and legato manner, and the period with Goodman's internationally celebrated band made her a star and launched her career. Her voice was soft, almost diffident - but like Billie Holiday, Lee was a product of the electric microphone era, able to dominate even a roaring big band with delicate inflections and the nuances of a sigh. The big bands were also crash courses in jazz technique for singers with the intelligence and curiosity to learn from them - every solo instrument had its own sound and feel, and while Ella Fitzgerald probably took mimicry of the instruments further than anyone else of her generation, the best singers absorbed a jazz instrumentalist's adventurousness with the placing of the beat, and ability to create expectation and drama by the use of space and delay as much as sound.

The New Yorker's Whitney Balliett called Peggy Lee "a stripped-note singer . . . her vibrato spare and her volume low." She disliked grandstanding effects or thunderous climaxes, and most of her notes were short, as if she were reducing her materials to a shorthand account of an originally more complex song. Balliett also wrote: "Peggy Lee sends her feelings down the quiet centre of her notes. She is not a melody singer. She does not carry a tune; she elegantly follows it. She is a rhythm singer who moves all around the beat, who swings as intensely and eccentrically as Billie Holiday."

In 1942 Peggy Lee recorded her first major hit, the million-selling Why Don't You Do Right?. When she then left Goodman (following the departure of the guitarist Dave Barbour, with whom she was having a relationship) her career was made. She had fronted the biggest swing band in the country and she followed that period with national touring and radio performances on her own account, beginning her recording career in the last year with Goodman and beginning also to develop as a songwriter as well as a performer.

With Barbour, Lee had a daughter, Nicki Lee Foster, and the singer was to marry three times within the 1950s. Actor Brad Dexter followed Barbour (1955, divorced the same year), then another actor, Dewey Martin - married April, 1956, divorced 1959. Working with Capitol Records from early in her solo career, she had quick successes with It's a Good Day and Manana, the latter a two-million selling hit.

Lee's skills were broadening her career in ways that few star vocalists could manage. She began writing and singing for movies, composing the theme for the 50s western Johnny Guitar, and providing the lyrics and several characters for Disney's 1955 Lady and the Tramp - though it wasn't until 1991 that Lee was finally able to secure a share of the enormous profits the movie had later earned in video sales, eventually securing $3.8m for her crucial work on the film 36 years earlier.

In 1950 Peggy Lee had begun to appear as a movie actress as well, initially in Mr Music, then with Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, and in Pete Kelly's Blues in 1955, for which she was nominated for an Oscar for her role as an alcoholic blues singer. Lee used to joke that her agents kept scripts from her in case she decided to abandon singing for acting - the size of their cut was a lot bigger if she kept singing. But she didn't need much persuading of where her best options lay. Lover, Fever, and Is That All There Is? (a double Grammy in 1969) were songs that would always bring her name instantly to mind, her concerts began to be sell-outs that in the mainstream-to-swing field even Frank Sinatra had trouble rivalling, and her fans bridged all generations and cultures - Albert Einstein and Aldous Huxley had even been among them.

Peggy Lee was a perfectionist throughout her long career. She would keep detailed notes of lighting effects, costume, cosmetics, and choreograph body language like an actor or a dancer. Though her sound and approach came from jazz, her stardom came from the scrupulous planning of a unique product that could be delivered intact night after night. But her later career was hampered by ill-health. Lee was a diabetic, and also stopped work twice for pneumonia in the 50s and 60s, sometimes going on the road with a respirator. She also suffered a near-fatal fall in 1967 that affected her sight and hearing, and made standing difficult. In early 1985, she had arterial surgery, and a double heart-bypass the same year.

Yet she continued as often as she could to use her remarkable achievements (over 650 songs recorded, and 60 or more albums, many of them gold discs) to entertain audiences worldwide and to help causes with which she sympathised. Her citations included the New York Film Critic's Award, an Oscar nomination, a Grammy for Is That All There Is?, and tributes for her support and contributions from the Cancer Society, the Heart Fund, the National Brotherhood of Christians and Jews, and many others.

Henry Pleasants, writing in The Great American Popular Singers, had this to say of Peggy Lee. "No other singer in my experience has asked less of a voice while using it so much," Pleasants wrote. "No other has done more with what the voice has given her. She has never pushed it beyond its natural compass. I doubt that she has ever sung louder than a mezzo forte. And yet, within a precariously narrow range, both of vocal compass and vocal amplitude, she has mined a wealth and variety of colour, inflection, eloquent lyricism and even grandeur hardly matched by any other singer, male or female, not excluding Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, both of whom had a lot more voice to start with."

kd lang told The Washington Post last year: "The smallest variation in pitch, in phrasing, in meaning, drives me crazy, and Peggy was the master of it. Perhaps my enthusiasm for minimalist approaches comes from growing up on the prairie, where the flat horizon and the lack of trees made any movement significant. Whatever the reason, the subtlety of Peggy's delivery is what I long for." And Gene Lees, a lifelong Lee fan, put his finger on her magic when he remarked that the feeling in Lee's songs was often "perceived in flashes, like lightning in a summer cloud. This is the secret of the striking dramatic miniatures of the human and especially woman's condition that make her the extraordinary artist that she is. Like Sinatra, she has an almost uncanny ability to find and bring out the meaning of a song."

· Peggy Lee (Norma Delores Egstrom), born May 26, 1920, died January 22 2002

edgar, I read every single bit of that biog. I did not know all the details of Peggy Lee's life, but I most certainly know her music.

We Are Siamese If You Please
by Lady And The Tramp
We are Siamese if you please
We are Siamese if you don't please
We are from a residence of Siam
There is no finer cat than I am

Do you see that thing swimming round and round
Maybe we can reach on in and make it drown
If we sneaking up upon it carefully
There will be head for you and a tail for me

We are Siamese if you please
We are Siamese if you don't please
Now we're looking over our new domicile
If we like we stay for maybe quite a while

Meow.......here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty

Do you hear what I hear a baby cry
Where we finding baby there's milk near by
And if we look in baby buggy there could be
Plenty of milk for you and also some for me

We are Siamese if you please
We are Siamese if you don't please
Now we're looking over our new domisile
If we like we stay for maybe quite a while

We are Siamese if you please
We are Siamese if you don't please
We are from a residence of Siam
There is no finer cat than I am

There is no finer cat than I am

There are no finer cats than we am

Uhoh. The cat lovers may pounce on that one.

And Diana Krall and K.D. Lang know of what they speak.

I apologize that the article was so long. I forget that not everyone is interested in the same things as I.

No need for apologies, edgar. Some things read smoothly when the interest is high.

Incidentally, Did Peggy Lee do a song called, "I can sing a rainbow"?

When it comes to music Edgar...I read it all.

You know, Panz. Misti wants to do an illustrated poetry thread.

When I asked about "I Can Sing a Rainbow," I found this:

(by Arthur Hamilton)
Red and yellow and pink and green,
Purple and orange and blue,
I can sing a rainbow,
Sing a rainbow,
Sing a rainbow too!

Listen to your heart,
Listen to your heart,
And sing everything you feel,
I can sing a rainbow,
Sing a rainbow,
Sing a rainbow too

Alternate Version:

Red and yellow and pink and green
Purple and orange and blue
I can sing a rainbow,
sing a rainbow,
sing a rainbow too.

Listen with your eyes,
Listen with your ears,
and sing everything you see,
I can sing a rainbow,
sing a rainbow,
sing along with me.

Red and yellow and pink and green,
Purple and orange and blue,
I can sing a rainbow,
sing a rainbow,
sing a rainbow too!

My Lord, I love it.

You can do pictures, Panz.

It's been so long, listeners, since we were inspired to paint and to create and to spring from our cocoon...................................................

Thanks for posting Peggy Lee's bio, Edgar. I loved her style. Every man I ever knew, not that I knew that many, thought Peggy was "the sexiest".

I'm trying to remember her song (Mac got me the title a while back, but I've forgotten it again) in which she sings about all the things they'll have when they get married, i. e. "we'll have a dog, we'll have a kid (we don't want a bent one).
Not much to go on, but maybe it will ring a bell.

Not familiar, raggedyaggie.

Edgar. I found it. It's a Randy Newman song that Peggy recorded and it's on one of her CDs and I'm going to buy it before I forget the song again.
It's called Love Story.

I like your mother
I like your brother
I like you
And you like me too
We'll get a preacher
I'll buy a ring
We'll hire a band
With an accordion
A violin
And a tenor who can sing
You and me you and me, baby
You and me you and me you and me, baby
You and me you and me you and me, baby
You and me you and me you and me, baby
We'll have a kid
Or maybe we'll rent one
He's got to be straight
We don't want a bent one
He'll drink his baby brew
From a big brass cup
Someday he may be president
If things loosen up

You and me you and me, baby
You and me you and me you and me, baby
You and me you and me you and me, baby
You and me you and me you and me, baby
I'll take the train into the city ev'ry mornin'

You may be plain - I think you're pretty in the mornin'
And some nights we'll go out dancin'
If I am not too tired
Some nights we'll sit romancin'
Watching the Late Show by the fire
When our kids are grown
With kids of their own
They'll send us away
To a little home in Florida
We'll play checkers all day
Until we pass away.

What can one say? Ira and George rolled into one. Randy Newman is a poet laureate of American song.

Sail Away

In America you'll get food to eat
Won't have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It's great to be an American

Ain't no lions or tigers-ain't no mamba snake
Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake
Ev'rybody is as happy as a man can be
Climb aboard, little wog-sail away with me

Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay

In America every man is free
To take care of his home and his family
You'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree
You're all gonna be an American

Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay

Panzade: You may not remember, but on another thread I mentioned I was looking for "Bird on a Wire" by Esther Phillips, when it was really Esther Opharim. Well after locating it on an Israeli site and ordering it, I returned it because it was in Israeli. Then I found a seller through Amazon and got the english version and I like it as much as I did when I heard it on radio over 30 years ago. (lol)

Was it this one?

by Leonard Cohen

Like a bird on the wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
Like a fish on a hook,
like a knight from an old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee.
If I have been unkind,
I hope that you could just let it go by.
And if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you. No, no
Like a baby, stillborn,
like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me.
But I swear by this song
By all I have done wrong
I'll make it all up to you. Yes I will
I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,
H called out to me, Don't ask for so much.
And a young man leaning on his darkened door,
He cried out to me, Hey, why not ask for more?
Like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.

YES. I had Cohen's record, but I had been trying to find the Esther Opharim version after hearing a D.J. play his personal record of it those many years ago. I love, love her version.

And now, goodnight to all at WA2k.

Oh, my! Randy Newman and Leonard Cohen in the same evening? My head is spinning!

The fox went out to the chase one night
Prayed to the moon to give him light
He had many a mile to go that night
Before he reached the town-o, town-o town-o,
Many a mile to go that night before he reached the town
Many a mile to go that night before he reached the town

He ran 'til he came to a great big pen
Where the ducks and the geese were kept there in
Said a couple of you gonna grease my chin
Before I leave this town o, town o, town o
Couple of you gonna grease my chin before I leave this town
Couple of you gonna grease my chin before I leave this town

He grabbed the grey goose by the neck
Throwed a duck across his back
He didn't amind with the quack, quack quack
And the legs all dang-ling down-o, down-o, down-o
Didn't amind with the quack, quack quack
And the legs all dang-ling down-o, down-o, down-o
Didn't amind with the quack, quack quack
And the legs all dang-ling down-o, down-o, down-o

Old mother Flipper Flapper jumped out of bed
Out of the window she cocked her head
Cryin' John, John the grey goose is gone
And the fox is on the town-o, town-o, town-o
John, John the grey goose is gone
And the fox is on the town-o
John, John the grey goose is gone
And the fox is on the town-o

Well, the fox he came to his own den
There were the little ones, eight, nine, ten
Saying Daddy you better go back again
'Cause it must be a mighty fine town-o, town-o, town-o
Saying Daddy you better go back again
'Cause it must be a mighty fine town
Saying Daddy you better go back again
'Cause it must be a mighty fine town

Well, the fox and his wife without any strife
Cut up the goose with a carving knife
They never had such a supper in their life
And the little ones chewed on the bones-o, bones-o, bones-o
Never had such a supper in their life
And the little ones chewed on the bones
Never had such a supper in their life
And the little ones chewed on the bones

I'm feeling very sad about Mother Flipper Flapper. So, here are some Birthday Celebs to get our minds off Mrs. Flapper's family:

1882 Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd president of the United States (near Hyde Park, NY; died 1945)
1912 Barbara Tuchman, historian/journalist (New York, NY; died 1988)
1923 Dick Martin, comedian (Detroit, MI)
1930 Gene Hackman, actor (San Bernardino, CA)
1934 Tammy Grimes, actress (Lynn, MA)
1937 Vanessa Redgrave, actress (London, England)
1937 Boris Spassky, chess champion (Leningrad, USSR)
1951 Phil Collins, singer/songwriter/musician (London, England)
1951 Charles S. Dutton, actor (Baltimore, MD)
1955 Curtis Strange, golfer (Norfolk, VA)
1957 Payne Stewart, golfer (Springfield, MO; died 1999)
1958 Brett Butler, comedian/actress (Montgomery, AL)
1961 Jody Watley, singer (Chicago, IL)
1974 Christian Bale, actor (Pembrokeshire, West Wales)

Good afternoon, yall. Our predicted ice storm turned out to be pretty much a non-event. It started out ominously, causing johnboy to fidget a bit, but we ended up with only about an inch of ice which melted by noon.

I thought of yall this morning while listening to Weekend Edition Sunday on NPR. I can't do the story justice in only a paragraph, so, if interested, you should go to npr.org for the full story with, I assume, audio.
It seems that, beginning in the late 50's and runnng until the mid 70's big companies would commission mini-musicals to be written extolling the virtue of the company's products. These would be used at sales conventions to motivate the troops. Some guy has collected a couple of hundred recordings, which were often distributed to the attendees in LP form.
A number of recognized composers, lyricists and performers accepted these commissions because, frankly, they needed the money. But it was also challenging, particularly to the lyricists who would be handed a technical manual on this newly invented substance called silicone and had to put it to music.

More dead air space. Mm mm mm. (Looks around). Here's a platter from the past.


Living is a dream when you make it seem enchanted
Lovers take for granted all the world?s aglow, they ought to know
When you touch a star then you really are enchanted
Find a seed and plant it, love will make it grow

It?s really grand when you stand hand in hand with your lover
And thrill to the wonders of night
And days, too, will amaze you and soon you?ll discover
Your dreams run to dreams in continuous flight







Love is ecstasy, it?s divine to be enchanted
When your dreams are slanted through a lover?s eyes

It?s really grand when you stand hand in hand with your lover
And thrill to the wonders of night
And days, too, will amaze you and soon you?ll discover
Your dreams run to dreams in continuous flight

Love is ecstasy, it?s divine to be enchanted
When your dreams are slanted through a lover?s eyes


The Platters Enchanted Lyrics

just heard this today

man that groucho could sing

Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia?
Lydia The Tattooed Lady.
She has eyes that folks adore so,
and a torso even more so.
Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclo-pidia.
Oh Lydia The Queen of Tattoo.
On her back is The Battle of Waterloo.
Beside it, The Wreck of the Hesperus too.
And proudly above waves the red, white, and blue.
You can learn a lot from Lydia!

La-la-la...la-la-la.
La-la-la...la-la-la.

When her robe is unfurled she will show you the world,
if you step up and tell her where.
For a dime you can see Kankakee or Paree,
or Washington crossing The Delaware.

La-la-la...la-la-la.
La-la-la...la-la-la.

Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia?
Lydia The Tattooed Lady.
When her muscles start relaxin',
up the hill comes Andrew Jackson.
Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclo-pidia.
Oh Lydia The Queen of them all.
For two bits she will do a mazurka in jazz,
with a view of Niagara that nobody has.
And on a clear day you can see Alcatraz.
You can learn a lot from Lydia!

La-la-la...la-la-la.
La-la-la...la-la-la.

Come along and see Buffalo Bill with his lasso.
Just a little classic by Mendel Picasso.
Here is Captain Spaulding exploring the Amazon.
Here's Godiva, but with her pajamas on.

La-la-la...la-la-la.
La-la-la...la-la-la.

Here is Grover Whelan unveilin' The Trilon.
Over on the west coast we have Treasure Isle-on.
Here's Nijinsky a-doin' the rhumba.
Here's her social security numba.

La-la-la...la-la-la.
La-la-la...la-la-la.

Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclo-pidia.
Oh Lydia The Champ of them all.
She once swept an Admiral clear off his feet.
The ships on her hips made his heart skip a beat.
And now the old boy's in command of the fleet,
for he went and married Lydia!

I said Lydia...
(He said Lydia...)
They said Lydia...
We said Lydia, la, la!