February 2002

Late Night
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For the next two years, Lee performed and recorded with Goodman, earning a lot of notice and a reputation as a fine singer. She married David Barbour, the band’s guitarist, and spent time away from performing, raising her children and writing songs with her husband. One of those songs, “Manana”, turned into a huge hit, selling over two million copies.

Peggy was always popular with other musicians, including jazz luminaries such as Count Basie and Sarah Vaughn because of her style, taste, and ability to swing. Although the demise of big band and swing music made her career difficult, Lee was able to remain popular when many of her contemporaries had disappeared from the scene. One reason was her intelligence and versatility; she appeared in films, composed, wrote poetry, and painted. Like a lot of musicians she was drawn to painting because of the ways it allowed her to combine colors in order to express mood, much the way tonal coloration expresses mood in music.

She was gutsy, too. In 1991 she won a lawsuit against Disney, a jury ruling that she was entitled to some $3.8 million in proceeds from the sale of videos of the animated classic Lady and the Tramp, for which she provided many voices and wrote the lyrics to the film’s songs. Peggy had been paid $3,500 for her contributions back in 1955, when videos just didn’t exist.

It was interesting to hear many media outlets classify Ms. Lee as “a jazz singer” even though many of her post-Goodman hits probably fall more into the popular singer category. It’s a testament to her talent and the esteem that she enjoyed among musicians and fans alike. Though not covered well by the jazz press, she did make her impression on the music with her bluesy renditions of “Fever” and “Why Don’t You Do Right?”

Another sad note in American song was the news that singer Rosemary Clooney would undergo surgery for lung cancer. Like Lee, Clooney escaped an intolerable family situation at an early age by relying on her singing talents. She became one of the country’s top singers, performing with Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, among others. Long considered an excellent cabaret singer and interpreter of songs, she underwent something of a career metamorphosis in later years and is now considered a very serious and full-fledged jazz singer. In fact, she’s as good as anyone out there, whether you look at her contemporaries or the newer singers to come down the pike over the last couple of decades.

It’s hard to imagine, in a world populated by Britney Spears and her ilk, but both Lee and Clooney were once considered, along with Frank Sinatra and Der Bingle, to be pop singers. “Pop” as in popular—that designation didn’t stop jazz musicians and critics from lauding them as real jazz musicians, nor should it have. The purpose of a popular singer then was very different from now. The emphasis was on interpreting top-notch songs written by someone else in such a way that the listener could personally experience the emotion portrayed by the song. In Clooney’s words: "I'm the only instrument that's got the words, so I've got to be able to get that across." The same is certainly true of jazz singing, but there is another criteria—the vocalist must swing, just as any instrumentalist would be called upon to do. The CD bins are littered with those who can do one or the other, but there are very few singers coming up who can do both. Sometimes, as with instrumentalists, youngsters may have the chops and the feel for jazz that makes one able to perform with great and impressive facility, one may even be able to break out and really swing for brief periods, but it may just be that the ability to really understand, feel, and communicate the emotional content of the song may be beyond the grasp of the youthful performer. On the other hand, there are some wonderful cabaret singers who can make the listener feel as though a standard is being freshly interpreted just for them, but who would never be able to phrase in the way that true jazz singing requires. Lee was able to do both, offering real jazz phrasing even though she rarely improvised.

These days pop singers either write their own material or perform the songs cranked out for them by songwriters who write not to express the deepest emotions of everyday people, but to capture the sound of last week’s top-selling record. It certainly leads to difficulty in updating the standard repertoire. There is simply a paucity of really good songs being written these days, so the singer must inevitably turn to the standards again and again. Frank Sinatra encountered this problem in the ‘60s, when he turned to covering songs by The Beatles, Jimmy Webb, Stevie Wonder, and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Today’s jazz and cabaret singers have even fewer options for covering material that is both deserving of a deep reading and will be listenable to a young audience that is far out of touch with the standards.

This is what makes the loss of a singer like Peggy Lee particularly difficult to accept. It is as though a part of America’s collective culture is lost each time one of these special singers passes away. Lee must have instinctively realized this, as she established the Peggy Lee Scholarship for Singers at the Julliard School. Her family has asked that in lieu of flowers donations be made to these organizations:

The Society of Singers
8242 West Third Street, Suite #250
Los Angeles, CA 90046
(323) 651-1696

Peggy Lee Scholarship for Singers
The Juilliard School
60 Lincoln Center Plaza
New York, NY 10023
(212) 799-5000

Lee received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy award. Rosemary Clooney, who is recovering from surgery at the Mayo Clinic, is due to receive the same award when the Grammys are presented on February 27, 2002. Wish her a speedy recovery so that she can enjoy this deserved recognition of her work. Then put on a couple Lee and Clooney discs (maybe some Sinatra as well) and revel in music that doesn’t sacrifice depth and honesty in order to be recognized as popular.