Norma Deloris Egstrom[a] (May 26, 1920 – January 21, 2002), known professionally as Peggy Lee, was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, and actress whose career spanned seven decades. From her beginning as a vocalist on local radio to singing with Benny Goodman's big band, Lee created a sophisticated persona, writing music for films, acting, and recording conceptual record albums combining poetry and music. Called the "Queen of American pop music",[10] Lee recorded more than 1,100 masters and co-wrote over 270 songs.
Early life
Lee was born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, United States, on May 26, 1920, the seventh of the eight children of Selma Emele (née Anderson) Egstrom and Marvin Olaf Egstrom, a station agent for the Midland Continental Railroad. Her family were Lutherans.[11] Her father was Swedish-American and her mother was Norwegian-American.[12] After her mother died when Lee was four,[13] her father married Minnie Schaumberg Wiese.[14] His family's original name was Ekström.[15]
Lee and her family lived in several towns along the Midland Continental Railroad (Jamestown, Nortonville and Wimbledon). She graduated from Wimbledon High School in 1937.[16]
Lee began singing from a young age. In Wimbledon, Lee was the female singer for a six-piece college dance band with leader Lyle "Doc" Haines. She traveled to various locations with Haines's quintet on Fridays after school and on weekends.[17]
Lee first sang professionally over KOVC radio in Valley City, North Dakota, in 1936.[18] She later had her own 15-minute Saturday radio show sponsored by a local restaurant that paid her salary in food. Both during and after her high-school years, Lee sang for small sums on local radio stations.
In October 1937, radio personality Ken Kennedy, of WDAY in Fargo (the most widely heard station in North Dakota), auditioned her and put her on the air that day, but not before he changed her name to Peggy Lee.[19]
Lee left home and traveled to Hollywood, California, at the age of 17 in March 1938. Her first job was seasonal work on Balboa Island, Newport Beach, as a short order cook and waitress at Harry's Cafe. When the job ended after Easter, she was hired to work as a carnival barker at the Balboa Fun Zone. She wrote about this experience in the song, "The Nickel Ride", which she composed with Dave Grusin for the 1974 film of the same name.[17]
Later in 1938, Lee returned to Hollywood to audition for the MC at The Jade. Her employment was cut short when she fainted onstage due to overwork and an inadequate diet. After she was taken to the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center she was told she needed a tonsillectomy. Lee returned to North Dakota for the operation.[20]
The following year, remaining in North Dakota, she was hired to perform regularly at The Powers Hotel in Fargo, and toured with both the Sev Olson and the Will Osborne Orchestras.[21] In 1939 she was also again broadcasting at WDAY.[22]
When Lee returned to California in 1940, she took a job singing at The Doll House in Palm Springs. Here, she developed her trademark sultry purr, having decided to compete with the noisy crowd with subtlety rather than volume.
Peggy Lee, famous for her sultry singing voice, featured in a cigarette ad in 1953.
I knew I couldn't sing over them, so I decided to sing under them. The more noise they made, the more softly I sang. When they discovered they couldn't hear me, they began to look at me. Then, they began to listen. As I sang, I kept thinking, 'softly with feeling'. The noise dropped to a hum; the hum gave way to silence. I had learned how to reach and hold my audience—softly, with feeling.[17]
While performing at The Doll House, Lee met Frank Bering, the owner of the Ambassador East and West in Chicago. He offered her a gig at the Buttery Room, a nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel West. There, she was noticed by bandleader Benny Goodman. 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 a 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 August 1941 and made her first recording, singing "Elmer's Tune". Lee stayed with the Benny Goodman Orchestra for two years.[23][24]
Recording career
In 1942, Lee had her first top ten hit, "Somebody Else Is Taking My Place",[25] followed in 1943 by "Why Don't You Do Right?", which sold more than one million copies and made her famous.[26] She sang with Goodman's orchestra in two 1943 films, Stage Door Canteen and The Powers Girl.
In March 1943, Lee married Dave Barbour, a guitarist in Goodman's band.[18] Lee 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.
— Peggy Lee
... when she left the band that spring [1943], her intention was to quit the footlights altogether and become Mrs. Barbour, fulltime housewife. It's to Mr. Barbour's credit that he refused to let his wife's singing and composing talent lie dormant for too long. "I fell in love with David Barbour," she recalled. "But 'Why Don't You Do Right' was such a giant hit that I kept getting offers and kept turning them down. And at that time it was a lot of money, but it really didn't matter to me at all. I was very happy. All I wanted was to have a family and cling to the children [daughter Nicki]. Well, they kept talking to me and finally David joined them and said 'You really have too much talent to stay at home and someday you might regret it.'"
She drifted back to songwriting and occasional recording sessions for Capitol Records in 1944, for whom she recorded 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". Her recording of "Golden Earrings", the title song of a 1947 movie, was a hit throughout 1947–1948. "Mañana", written by Lee and Barbour, was her eleventh solo hit recording, and remained on the charts for twenty-one weeks, nine of which were in the number one position. The song sold more than a million copies, and earned the Top Disc Jockey Record of the Year award from Billboard magazine.[28] From 1946 to 1949, Lee also recorded for Capitol's library of electrical transcriptions for radio stations. An advertisement for Capitol Transcriptions in a trade magazine noted that the transcriptions included "special voice introductions by Peggy".[29]
Her relationship with Capitol spanned almost three decades aside from a brief detour (1952–1956) at Decca.[32] For that label, she recorded Black Coffee and had hit singles such as "Lover" and "Mister Wonderful".
While Lee was in London for a 1970 engagement at Royal Albert Hall, she invited Paul and Linda McCartney to dinner at The Dorchester. At the dinner, the couple gifted Lee with a song they had written entitled, "Let's Love". In July 1974, with Paul McCartney producing, Lee recorded the song at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, and it became the title track for her 40th album, her only one on Atlantic Records.[20]
Acting career
Photo of Peggy Lee and Danny Thomas from The Jazz Singer
Lee provided speaking and singing voices for several characters in the Disney movie Lady and the Tramp (1955), playing the human Darling, the dog Peg, and the two Siamese cats, Si and Am. She also co-wrote, with Sonny Burke, all of the original songs for the film, including "He's A Tramp", "Bella Notte", "La La Lu", "The Siamese Cat Song", and "Peace on Earth". In 1987, when Lady and the Tramp was released on VHS, Lee sought performance and song royalties on the video sales. When the Disney company refused to pay, she filed a lawsuit in 1988. After a prolonged legal battle, in 1992, Lee was awarded $2.3 million for breach of contract, plus $500,000 for unjust enrichment, $600,000 for illegal use of Lee's voice and $400,000 for the use of her name.[36][37]
Peggy Lee also wrote the lyrics for "Johnny Guitar" (with music composer Victor Young), the title track of the 1954 film, Johnny Guitar, which she sings partially at the end of the movie.
During her career, Lee appeared in hundreds of variety shows, and several TV movies and specials.
Personal life
Lee was married four times: to guitarist and composer Dave Barbour (1943–1951),[38][39] actor Brad Dexter (1953), actor Dewey Martin (1956–1958), and percussionist Jack Del Rio (1964).[20] All the marriages ended in divorce.
On November 11, 1943, Lee gave birth to her only child, daughter Nicki Lee Foster (who died in 2014), in her marriage to Barbour.[40]
Lee learned Transcendental Meditation and said she was taught "by the Maharishi personally and that was a great honor."[41]
Death
The Peggy Lee bench-style burial monument
Lee continued to perform into the 1990s, sometimes using a wheelchair.[42] After years of poor health, she died of complications from diabetes and a heart attack on January 21, 2002, at the age of 81.[43] She was cremated and her ashes were buried with a bench-style monument in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.[44]
Lee is often cited as the inspiration for the Margarita cocktail. In 1948, after a trip to Mexico, she and her husband ventured into the Balinese Room in Galveston, Texas. She requested a drink similar to one she had had in Mexico, and the head bartender, Santos Cruz, created the Margarita, and named it after the Spanish version of Peggy's name.[53]
Lee was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Recording in 1960. The star is located at 6319 Hollywood Boulevard in California.[54]
Baseball's Tug McGraw, whose career with both the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies ranged from 1965 to 1984, named one of his pitches the Peggy Lee. He explained to The Philadelphia Inquirer: "That's the one where the hitter is out in front of it and says, 'Is that all there is?'"[55]
The designer of the Miss PiggyMuppet, Bonnie Erickson, who grew up in Lee's home state of North Dakota, used the singer as inspiration for the Miss Piggy character in 1974. Originally called Miss Piggy Lee, her name was shortened to Miss Piggy when the Muppet gained fame.[57]
In 1975, Lee received an honorary doctorate in music from North Dakota State University,[20] and in 2000, she received another from Jamestown University.[58]
In 1983, Lee had a hybrid tea rose named in her honor that was pink with a touch of peach. The Peggy Lee Rose was the 1983 American Beauty Rose of the Year.[59][60]
The Wimbledon depot building, where she and her family lived and worked, became the Midland Continental Depot Transportation Museum, featuring The Peggy Lee Exhibit, in 2012. The upper floor of the museum, where the Egstrom family once lived, features exhibits that trace Lee's career and her regional and state connection.[16]
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Lee's birth, May 26, 2020, The Grammy Museum hosted an online panel discussion featuring musicians Billie Eilish, k.d. lang, Eric Burton (The Black Pumas), as well as Lee's granddaughter, Holly Foster Wells, and the author of Peggy Lee: A Century of Song, Dr. Tish Oney.[64]
In 2020, the ASCAP Foundation, along with Lee's family, established the annual Peggy Lee Songwriter Award. The inaugural award went to Michael Blum and Jenna Lotti for their song, "Fake ID".[74]
Lee wrote or co-wrote more than 270 songs.[28] In addition to her own material to sing, she was hired to score and compose songs for movies. For the Disney movie Lady and the Tramp, she co-composed all of the original songs with Burke, and supplied the singing and speaking voices of four characters.[75]
Lee's first published song was in 1941, "Little Fool". "What More Can a Woman Do?" was recorded by Sarah Vaughan with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. "Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me)" was number one on the Billboard singles chart for nine weeks in 1948, from the week of March 13 to May 8.
Lee was a mainstay of Capitol Records when rock and roll came onto the American music scene. She was among the first of the "old guard" to recognize this new genre, as seen by her recording music from the Beatles, Randy Newman, Carole King, James Taylor, and other up-and-coming songwriters. From 1957 until her final disc for the company in 1972, she produced a steady stream of two or three albums per year that usually included standards (often arranged quite differently from the original), her own compositions, and material from young artists.
Friedwald, Will. Liner notes for The Best of Peggy Lee: The Capitol Years.
Gavin, James. Is That All There Is? – The Strange Life of Peggy Lee. Atria Books, 2014. ISBN978-1-4516-4168-4
Lee, Peggy. Miss Peggy Lee: An Autobiography. Donald I. Fine, 1989. ISBN978-1-5561-1112-9
Oney, Dr. Tish Oney, Peggy Lee: A Century of Song. Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. ISBN978-1-5381-2847-3
Richmond, Peter, Fever: The Life and Music of Miss Peggy Lee. Henry Holt and Company, 2006. ISBN0-8050-7383-3
Strom, Robert. Miss Peggy Lee: A Career Chronicle. McFarland Publishing, 2005. ISBN0-7864-1936-9
Notes
^Sources vary as to the spelling of Lee's birth surname. She specified it as "Egstrom" in her autobiography,[1] a spelling accepted by sources such Britannica,[2] the New York Times obituary,[3] and the website peggylee.com maintained by her estate.[4] However, other sources give the name as "Engstrom".[5][6][7][8][9]
References
^Peggy Lee (April 16, 1989). Miss Peggy Lee: A Biography. D. Fine. ISBN1556111126.
^Peggy Lee, Encyclopaedia Britannica, March 8, 2024, retrieved March 20, 2024
^Torresen, David (content) and Uy, David (design). "Biography – Current Biography". PeggyLee.com. Retrieved December 15, 2012.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
