PEGGY LEE: A great American popular singer of wit, sensuality, intelligence and extraordinarily expressive minimalism, Peggy Lee, who died on January 21st aged 81, let her audiences breathe. Countless singers - from the unknown to the most revered - hung on her every nuance, and vocal artists, from the late Frank Sinatra to k.d. lang and Elvis Costello, quote her work as an inspiration.
Unlike Ella Fitzgerald, who made vocal acrobatics sound as easy as singing in the bath, Peggy Lee was not an outwardly artless singer. She cultivated every move she made on stage - from the curl of a lip to the arch of an eyebrow, or the resolving note of a song.
Peggy Lee chose a louche, resigned, seen-it-all persona for one of her best-known songs, Is That All There Is?, and even the heated atmosphere of Fever, virtually her signature tune, has an underlying suggestion that the person raising the temperature doesn't have to be the one doing it next week. Outside her dressing-room Peggy Lee extended her explorations to poetry, writing (including screenplays), painting, fabric and card design, and humanitarian work for a variety of charities and women's groups.
She was born Norma Delores Egstrom in the North Dakota farm town of Jamestown, the daughter of Marvin Egstrom, a Scandinavian immigrant railroad worker, and his wife Selma. But she was raised by a stepmother in a relationship from which she was anxious to escape, and, as a teenager, her statuesque appearance and emerging musical talent convinced her she could work as a singer.
She went briefly to Hollywood straight from high school, but soon returned home. She then acquired the name Peggy Lee while broadcasting on the WDAY radio station in Fargo, North Dakota. The Doll House, in Palm Springs, California, was the place she credited with forming her oblique and whispery singing style, an approach she adopted with startling boldness for her age. Finding she couldn't be heard above the noise, she dropped her volume to make the audience wonder what they were missing, and found that it worked.
By the late 1930s, she was finding work with smaller bands on the west coast, and in Minneapolis and Chicago, but her real break came with the bandleader Benny Goodman.
Goodman was not much of a respecter of female singers. Like many jazz figures of the day, he resented the fact that they brought in a general audience, and helped swing to stay at the forefront of popular taste. But in 1941, shortly before the departure of his vocalist Helen Forrest, he was recommended to hear Peggy Lee at the Ambassador Hotel, Chicago. Goodman liked her and she worked with him between 1941 and 1943. She credited her 20 months with such a skilful orchestra as an incalculable influence on her phrasing and technique.Her voice was soft, almost diffident. But, like Billie Holiday, she was a product of the electric microphone era, able to dominate even a roaring big band with delicate inflections and the nuances of a sigh.
The New Yorker called Peggy Lee "a stripped-note singer . . . her vibrato spare and her volume low". She disliked grandstanding effects or thunderous climaxes, and most of her notes were short, as if she were reducing her materials to a shorthand account of a complex song. "Peggy Lee sends her feelings down the quiet centre of her notes. She is not a melody singer. She does not carry a tune; she elegantly follows it. She is a rhythm singer who moves all around the beat, who swings as intensely and eccentrically as Billie Holiday."
In 1942, she recorded her first major hit, the million-selling Why Don't You Do Right? Then she fell in love with Goodman's guitarist, Dave Barbour, and withdrew from the music world to be his wife and raise their daughter, Nicki. But she returned to singing when the marriage fell apart.
"I kept blaming myself for his alcoholism and the failure of our marriage," she said. "And I finally understood what Sophie Tucker used to say: 'You have to have your heart broken at least once to sing a love song.' "
By the time she left Goodman her career was made. Working with Capitol Records from early in her solo career, she had quick successes with It's A Good Day and Mañana, the latter a two-million selling hit.
Peggy Lee's skills broadened her range in ways that few star vocalists could manage. She began writing and singing for films, composing the theme for the western Johnny Guitar (1954), and providing the lyrics and several characters for Disney's Lady And The Tramp (1951) - though it was not until 1991 that she won a share of the movie's enormous video profits, eventually securing $3.8 million for her work 36 years earlier.
By 1950, Peggy Lee had begun to appear as a film actor as well, initially in Mr Music (1950), then with Danny Thomas in the 1954-'55 remake of The Jazz Singer, and in Pete Kelly's Blues (1955), for which she got an Oscar nomination for her role as an alcoholic blues singer. Lover, Fever, and Is That All There Is? (a double Grammy in 1969), were songs that would always bring her name to mind, and her concerts began to be sellouts that even Sinatra had trouble rivalling.
Peggy Lee was a diabetic, and suffered from respiratory conditions which sometimes required her to carry a respirator when going on the road. She also suffered a near-fatal fall in 1967 that affected her sight and hearing, and made standing difficult. In early 1985, she had arterial surgery, and a double heart-bypass.
Yet she continued to use her remarkable achievements - more than 650 recorded songs and 60 or more albums, many of them gold discs - to entertain audiences worldwide and to help causes with which she sympathised. Her citations included the New York film critics' award, a Grammy for Is That All There Is?, and tributes for her support from the Cancer Society, the Heart Fund, the National Brotherhood of Christians and Jews, and many others.
Peggy Lee was married four times: in addition to Barbour, she was married to actors Brad Dexter and Dewey Martin and percussionist Jack Del Rio.
"They weren't really weddings, just long costume parties," she once said.
She is survived by Nicki Lee Foster, her daughter from her first marriage.
Peggy Lee (Norma Delores Egstrom): born 1920; died, January 2002