Norma Deloris Egstrom (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.
Her best known hits were recorded during her time at Capitol Records, including "Why Don't You Do Right?" (1943), "Fever" (1958), and "Is That All There Is?" (1969). The latter two songs earned her Grammy Awards. Towards her later recordings, Lee switched to complete vocal jazz with albums like Miss Peggy Lee Sings the Blues (1988).
Lee recorded more than 1,100 masters and co-wrote more than 270 songs. She is best known for her role in the Walt Disney classic Lady and the Tramp, where she voiced Darling, Peg, and the Siamese cats, among others. In 1956, she received an Academy Award nomination for her role in the 1955 film Pete Kelly's Blues. That same year, Lee was also nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award.
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. Her father was Swedish-American and her mother was Norwegian-American. After her mother died when Lee was four, her father married Minnie Schaumberg Wiese. His family's original name was Ekström.
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.
Lee began singing at a young age. In Wimbledon, she 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. Lee first sang professionally on KOVC radio in Valley City, North Dakota, in 1936. 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 North Dakota's most widely heard station, WDAY in Fargo, auditioned her and put her on the air that day, but not before he changed her name to Peggy Lee.
In March 1938, at age 17, Lee left home for Hollywood, California. 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 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.
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 malnutrition. 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.
In 1939, Lee was hired to perform regularly at The Powers Hotel in Fargo, and toured with both the Sev Olson and the Will Osborne Orchestras. She was also again broadcasting at WDAY.
When Lee returned to California in 1940, she took a job singing at The Doll House in Palm Springs. There, she developed her trademark sultry purr, having decided to compete with the noisy crowd with subtlety rather than volume.
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:
Career Recording career 1940–1951: Recordings with Benny Goodman and the early Capitol years
She joined Goodman's band in August 1941 and made her first recording, singing "Elmer's Tune". Lee stayed with the Benny Goodman Orchestra for two years.
On November 13, 1941, Lee recorded four songs: "Somebody Else Is Taking My Place", "Somebody Nobody Knows", "They Did It, Marie", and "How Long Has This Been Going On?." "Somebody Else Is Taking My Place" was soon released as a single and in 1942, Lee had her first top ten hit with it, followed in 1943 by "Why Don't You Do Right?", which sold more than one million copies and made her famous. 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. Lee said:
Will Friedwald has written:Liner notes written by Will Friedwald to Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman, The Complete Recordings, 1941–1947, Columbia/Legacy, 1999
In 1944, Lee drifted back to songwriting and occasional recording sessions for Capitol Records, for which 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 1947–48. "Mañana", by Lee and Barbour, was her eleventh solo hit recording, and remained on the charts for 21 weeks, including nine at the top position. The song sold more than a million copies, and earned the Top Disc Jockey Record of the Year award from Billboard magazine. 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".
In 1948, Lee joined vocalists Perry Como and Jo Stafford as a host of the NBC Radio musical program The Chesterfield Supper Club. She was a regular on The Jimmy Durante Show and appeared frequently on Bing Crosby's radio shows during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
1952–1957: Time at Decca
Her relationship with Capitol spanned almost three decades, aside from a brief detour (1952–1957) at Decca. Decca signed Lee in early 1952. The single "Be Anything (but Be Mine)" was released in mid-spring 1952 arranged by Gordon Jenkins. The San Francisco Chronicle asssesed it as a "very good" starter single for Decca. In May 1952, the song made the charts and peaked at No. 21.
The following single was "Lover" written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart for the 1932 film Love Me Tonight. Lee's version was used in the film The Jazz Singer. Released in late May 1952, it sold over 250,00 copies in just the first few weeks and peaked at No. 3 on the pop charts, becoming her biggest Decca hit. For a single in the summer, Decca partnered up Lee and Bing Crosby to record "Watermelon Weather". The song became a hit in America, as well as Australia where it hit No. 15. She would appear on Crosby's radio show two times in June 1952, singing duets, including "Watermelon Weather". Two other singles followed, both making the US pop charts: "Just One of Those Things" and "River River". Lee would be absent from the pop charts from there on until "Baubles, Bangles, & Beads" in late 1953, which hit the US top-30 and Australian top-10. Later, "Mister Wonderful" also hit the charts. It was her first UK pop chart entry as well, peaking at No. 5.
In April-May 1953, she recorded Black Coffee, regarded as a concept album. The album missed the charts upon its release, but charted in the UK almost 10 years later at No. 20 after a rerelease in the country. It also made a short chart appearance in 2021 on the US Billboard Jazz Albums at No. 24. Joni Mitchell declared the album one of her favorites.Black Coffee, Verve Master Edition 3093, 2004, liner notes. Later that year, Decca released their first Peggy Lee compilation titled Songs in an Intimate Style. In 1954 and 1955, Lee recorded albums with other popular singers of the time. Notably, she substituted for Rosemary Clooney on Selections from Irving Berlin's White Christmas. The album almost topped the charts in 1954, peaking at No. 2. Songs from Pete Kelly's Blues (with Ella Fitzgerald) managed to reach No. 7 on the Billboard pop charts the following year. In 1955, during Lady and the Tramp'''s release, a film which starred her, Lee's recordings for "He's A Tramp" and "The Siamese Cat Song" were released as a single by Decca Records. In 1956, "Joey, Joey, Joey" was Lee's final Decca single to make the charts at No. 76.
In 1957, Lee's final album for Decca was released and titled Dream Street, also regarded as a concept album. Music critic Jason Ankeny believed it contained "the first truly adult music of her career." Her contract expired in February 1957. Though she started recording for Capitol by then again, Lee's final Decca single came in 1958 with "Johnny Guitar".
1957–1973: Second Capitol phase
In 1958, she recorded her own version of "Fever" by Little Willie John, written by Eddie Cooley and Otis Blackwell. Lee created a new arrangement for the song, and added lyrics ("Romeo loved Juliet", "Captain Smith and Pocahontas"), which she neglected to copyright. Her version of "Fever" was a hit and was nominated in three categories at the 1st Annual Grammy Awards in 1959, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year.
In 1969, she teamed up with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for "Is That All There Is?". Produced and written by them, Lee's performance of the song won her the Grammy for Best Contemporary Vocal Performance. An album was soon assembled with the same name. Two singles were lifted from it, "Whistle for Happiness," which was her final Canadian singles chart appearance, and "Love Story," written by Randy Newman, which became her final pop hit.
Lee tried to return to the pop charts with a similar song to "Is That All There Is?" with "Where Did They Go", but the effort failed; it was her first single after the aforementioned hit to miss any chart. But an eponymous album did follow, released in mid 1971, it contained cover versions of pop hits by other artists.
1974–2000: Later recordings and genre shift 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 gave Lee a song they had written, "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 of her 40th album, her only one on Atlantic Records.
Lee continued to record for different labels in the 1970s, Mirrors for A&M in 1975, Peggy for Polydor in 1977, and Close Enough for Love in 1979 for DRG.
She returned in the 1980s to record vocal jazz albums such as Miss Peggy Lee Sings the Blues and Love Held Lightly: Rare Songs by Harold Arlen.
Acting career
Lee starred opposite Danny Thomas in The Jazz Singer (1952), a remake of the Al Jolson film, The Jazz Singer (1927). She played an alcoholic blues singer in Pete Kelly's Blues (1955), for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
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.