{"id":1288,"date":"2013-01-19T11:28:23","date_gmt":"2013-01-19T11:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peggylee.com\/wp\/?p=1288"},"modified":"2021-08-04T10:19:12","modified_gmt":"2021-08-04T14:19:12","slug":"good-echoes-of-bygone-sounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peggylee.com\/good-echoes-of-bygone-sounds\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Echoes of Bygone Sounds"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"pl_content\">\n    by Frances Dickerson and Caz Gorham<\/p>\n<p>    A spring afternoon in Bel Air\u2026 a time and a place as evocative as an English summer. Driving up into the hills of north Los Angeles, you glimpse (through the rainbows of the sprinklers that are everywhere), a world of ideal homes. Here great wealth is marked out by the emblems of the small town: a neat front lawn, newly painted fences, mailboxes and the sound of barking dogs. At this place, Heaven hangs close to the earth and stars are everywhere.<\/p>\n<p>    This is where the singer Peggy Lee now lives. She and her French Regency-style house seem well suited to Bel Air. Entering her home you feel you have stepped inside her music. It is an understated world of elegance and pastel shades, but novelty is present too: when Peggy Lee gardens she wears a karate suit. The singer, her home and her new album, Peggy Lee Sings the Blues (her first for ten years), are all bang-up-to-date and yet they remind us of the good things of the past.<\/p>\n<p>    \u201cMy new record is an album of old blues,\u201d she says. \u201cSongs by people like Leadbelly, Bessie Smith and Lil Green \u2013 whose song \u2018Why Don\u2019t You Do Right?\u2019 was my first hit. To me, good blues always sounds as if it\u2019s just been written. It\u2019s always fresh. When I sing I might find new meanings or want to create new impressions, but they\u2019re songs that to me never get old, they\u2019re always about right now.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>    Peggy Lee herself seems timeless. Her hair is still Scandinavian blonde and her skin luminously pale. She wears pajamas, decked with feathers and pearls, cut from a diaphanous fabric of a type she has for many years favored on and off the stage. She reminds you of an old-fashioned sweet made from spun sugar. The only jarring note was struck by the walking frame that a recent fall compelled her to use. She has, in recent years, been dogged by a series of illnesses and accidents that at one point forced her to perform sitting in a wheelchair. Her characteristic response to this was to begin her concerts with a wry rendition of \u201cI Won\u2019t Dance.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>    \u201cSometimes,\u201d she says, \u201cI think God just keeps me around for laughs. But He\u2019s fair, He makes sure I get mine, too, right back to when I started, when [in 1941] I was invited to join the already legendary Benny Goodman\u2019s band. I was a huge fan of Goodman\u2019s and it was wonderful not to have to put a nickel in the machine to listen to him. But sometimes he was too much. Terrifying. You\u2019ve heard of the \u2018Goodman ray\u2019? He would fix musicians with a look that would reduce big men to tears.<\/p>\n<p>    \u201cHis special trick for me was that he used to play the melody in my ear while I was singing. Now I don\u2019t really sing melody, so finally I said to him: \u2018If you do that one more time, I\u2019m going to hit you in the mouth!\u2019 I was on stage singing at the time and I had to fit in between verses, but he got the message. Later we both thought it was very funny.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>    In other ways, too, her ear and timing were good. She admits to being \u201calways on the look-out for something new, some fresh sound or rhythm. I\u2019d get my ideas from anywhere. Once, I got an idea for the way I could change the rhythms of a song by watching a film about the Foreign Legion. It had lots of horses and watching theses horses walk, then trot, then canter, then gallop, suggested to me how I could switch the rhythms in this particular song. That song was \u2018Lover.\u2019 \u201c<\/p>\n<p>    This appetite soon established her as one of the most audacious and versatile singers of popular music. She was the first American singer to incorporate Latin rhythms into her songs. \u201cMa\u00f1ana,\u201d her first experiment, was for years her biggest hit. She recalls: \u201cIt caught on immediately, everyone seemed to be grateful for a new way to go.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>    These songs suggest only a small part of the range she has marked out through the three decades that stretch from the Goodman\u2019s big band era to the Seventies. There was also the poignant theme from the cult western , the soundtrack for Walt Disney\u2019s Lady and the Tramp> (for which she also supplied the voice of Peg, the tarty street dog), to the irresistibly sexy \u201cFever.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>    In 1969 she recorded her haunting version of \u201cIs That All There Is?,\u201d Leiber and Stoller\u2019s song about the disappointment of seeing one\u2019s first circus, experiencing first love, and so on. This song spoke directly to Peggy Lee. \u201cI felt in some ways that song was my life. It wasn\u2019t written for me, but a lot of the lyrics seemed to be about me. Perhaps for that reason I was determined to find a way to sing it that sounded hopeful. It took me a long time, but I think I finally managed to turn it into something positive.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>    She regularly performs self-out concerts in America, but she has not recorded a new album for ten years. Why not?<\/p>\n<p>    \u201cRock music,\u201d she replies. \u201cThe standard writing of popular songs, show tunes and such has suffered greatly from rock. I\u2019ve always been hungry for change, but change for me means progress, and rock didn\u2019t seem to offer that. I found the Beatles quite musical\u2026Paul McCartney wrote a song specially for me. But in what came after the Beatles it was difficult for me to find the lyrics or the meaning. I like rock people \u2013 don\u2019t get me wrong, I don\u2019t want to sound as if I wouldn\u2019t have them around my house \u2013 but they left no room for me and my music.<\/p>\n<p>    Recently Peggy Lee has detected a change in popular music, a move away from the rock she found so alien. In response, she has recorded a new album. And she is once again taking chances. Abandoning the lush productions of her later records, she has returned to a stripped-down quintet of piano, bass, drums, percussion and vibraphone. It is an album which leaves the singer exposed, making no concessions, offering nowhere for a voice now in its late sixties, to hide.<\/p>\n<p>    From the first notes, her voice rings out \u2013 confident, supple and perfectly clear. She says: \u201cI don\u2019t like to think in terms of years. When you enter the world of a song, time means nothing. Your world goes on forever.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Frances Dickerson and Caz Gorham A spring afternoon in Bel Air\u2026 a time and a place as evocative as an English summer. Driving up into the hills of north Los Angeles, you glimpse (through the rainbows of the sprinklers that are everywhere), a world of ideal homes. Here great[&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-library"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Good Echoes of Bygone Sounds - Peggy Lee<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.peggylee.com\/good-echoes-of-bygone-sounds\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Good Echoes of Bygone Sounds - Peggy Lee\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"by Frances Dickerson and Caz Gorham A spring afternoon in Bel Air\u2026 a time and a place as evocative as an English summer. 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