Peggy Lee beat a rowdy Palm Springs crowd by singing more quietly
Faced with a noisy nightclub audience in 1940, a young singer from North Dakota refused to shout over them and dropped her voice instead, until the room went silent to hear her. That hushed, sultry style became Peggy Lee's signature, carrying her from local radio to Benny Goodman, Fever and Lady and the Tramp.
She was born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, in 1920, the seventh of eight children of a railroad station agent, and lost her mother at four. Singing started early: she toured with a small college dance band on weekends, and in 1936 made her professional radio debut on KOVC in Valley City, later hosting a Saturday show that paid her in restaurant meals. In October 1937 Ken Kennedy of WDAY in Fargo put her on the air the same day he auditioned her, renaming her Peggy Lee.
At 17 she headed for California, working as a short-order cook and a carnival barker, and collapsed onstage in Hollywood from overwork and poor nutrition. The breakthrough came after the Palm Springs discovery of her soft style: at a Chicago hotel nightclub, Benny Goodman's fiancee heard her and brought him along, and in August 1941 Lee joined his orchestra as Helen Forrest's replacement. Her 1943 hit Why Don't You Do Right? sold more than a million copies. That year she married Goodman's guitarist Dave Barbour; Goodman fired him for breaking the band's rule about the girl singer, and she walked out too.
Barbour then coaxed her back from retirement. At Capitol the couple wrote hits together, and their Manana spent nine weeks at number one in 1948. Her 1958 reworking of Fever, with new verses she never copyrighted, earned three nominations at the very first Grammy Awards. She was also an unusually open-eared veteran, recording songs by the Beatles, Carole King and Randy Newman when many of her generation dismissed rock.
Her turn as a hard-drinking singer in Pete Kelly's Blues brought an Oscar nomination, and for Disney's Lady and the Tramp she voiced four characters and co-wrote every original song with Sonny Burke. When Disney refused her royalties on the 1987 video release, she sued, and in 1992 won $2.3 million for breach of contract plus further damages. By her death in 2002 she had cut more than 1,100 masters and co-written over 270 songs.
Source: Peggy Lee
