WHY DON'T YOU DO RIGHT, LIKE SOME OTHER MEN DO?GET OUT OF HERE AND GET ME SOME MONEY TOO.
>>130881056Hot
>>130881056the first findom song?
>>130881056young Peggy Lee was still pretty underdeveloped as a singer, she wasn't the mature artiste of the 50s yet
Black Coffee was really the first concept LP ever made.
>>130881056there was a very lengthy Steve Hoffman Forum thread about Peggy Lee's life and music output. she was an extreme workaholic in her prime and suffered from periodic bouts of illness and near death from overwork and very little sleep.
>>130881056like her hero Ella, she wisely transitioned to the emergent cool jazz scene in the 50s and avoided chart hits most of the time so she didn't end up recording "The Wayward Wind" or "Oh Mein Papa."
>>130881291yet still her most famous ever song was that old favorite 50s meme of a whitened R&B cover
>>130881111she was very good looking in her 20s yes
>>130881411Whiting was the homeliest of the three, conversely also the least successful of them.
>>130881291Peggy happened to be fortunate to record for Decca and Capitol which didn't necessarily demand commercial singles out of her. If she recorded for CBS then it's Tony Bennett all over again where she might make some cool albums but the label doesn't release or promote them half the time and in the interim she's also compelled to sing Mitch Miller tunes for airplay, or she could record for Mercury who would probably do like they did with Sarah Vaughan and also insist on singles.
>>130881421she was hot for a while (hits-wise) in the late 40s but couldn't figure out how to transition into the 50s and kind of gave up
>>130881745I wouldn't say Peggy's singing was "showy", her monotone delivery was definitely unique for her time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJl6GZ8J-MUBest version of this standard only second to Blossom Dearie's. This was from '47. At this point Peggy was still in her 20s and had that youthful snap that kind of disappeared in the 50s onward.
i find it funny how her home town in North Dakota has all this "Birthplace of Peggy Lee" memorial crap there considering she fucked off to LA when she was 18 and never returned to that desolate shithole
>Lee developed her signature droning vocal style, her voice going under and weaving around the beat rather than riding over top it at high volume, when performing in nightclubs in Jamestown as a teenager, claiming "The club was extremely noisy inside and there was no point in belting it because nobody could hear me anyway."
>>130881056A total of 32 sides were recorded with Lee and Benny Goodman Orchestra which Columbia slowly put out over several months in 1941-42. There were additional songs left on the cutting room floor; these did not see the light of day until a 1980s Swedish Peggy Lee compilation. Hearing them, it's easy to understand why they were left in the can--the recordings are pretty cringe and have a lot of Reddit tier topical WW2 jokes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQl7uJxyMQwPeggy salvaging one of Mitch Miller's botched experiments (well ok a lot of people did this song).
>>130881821>fucked off to LA when she was 18 and never returned to that desolate shitholemany, many such cases
>>130882020tl;dr was the whole Joan Weber fiasco one of the typical examples of atrocious judgement he had in signing singers and she quietly disappeared after being unable to compete with Peggy, Dean Martin, Patti Page, and Teresa Brewer covering Let Me Go, Lover all at once. and then poor Weber died forgotten and insane in a mental hospital in only her 40s. the end.
>>130882062>Dean Martin, Patti Page, and Teresa BrewerGuess what else? All of them also fucked off from their desolate flyover home towns and never returned to them.
>>130881821it's miles and miles of nothing but this. also you wouldn't like it very much between November and March.
>>130881211iirc one instance was in late 1953 when she collapsed from lack of sleep and spent a while recuperating at a sanitarium. she was extraordinarily busy in that time period with recording, touring, concerts, caring for her school-aged daughter, and socializing in clubs, often with male love interests and it eventually caught up to her.
>>130881211https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/peggy-lee-on-record-1941-1995.634880/here it is if you can get past their addiction to discussing pressings and other technical aspects of vinyl which occupies a fair chunk of the thread
>The rise of rock-and-roll was a huge challenge to all established singers, not just aesthetically but from a pure dollars and cents aspect. Once beloved singers whose latest releases were eagerly anticipated were now seen as old news. They couldn't get club bookings, TV appearances, etc, or were dropped to a lower priority for them. Their income dropped and their music, which they devoted their lives to for many years, was also being ridiculed as antiquated.>Peggy Lee was as flummoxed by rock as most of her peers at first, but gradually learned to adapt to the changing times. It seemed she mainly disliked the lyrics of '50s R&R which she said were simplistic and meaningless. By 1962 however Lee was saying in interviews that rock songwriting was considerably improving, presumably meaning it had gotten past the "Wa ba ba wa la bam bam" phase of the '50s.
>>130882359if you didn't have a natural sense of rhythm you'd never grasp rock-and-roll
