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With my whole heart I thank God for fostering this vision and for giving me the strength, health, and necessary diligence to complete it. I offer sincerest thanks to John Chiodini for our years of collaborating onstage and off. He remains a joy to perform with and a dear friend, and I am tickled to consider this yet another collaboration we have created together. I sincerely wish to thank Holly Foster-Wells, Nicki Lee Foster, and Peggy Lee Associates, LLC, for their wealth of information, generosity, and encouragement to see this project through. I offer thanks to Mike and Peter Stoller for their time, insights, feedback, and contributions to this book. Iván Santiago-Mercado’s online discography and videography provided a plethora of invaluable facts and details—thank you, Iván. Both Will Friedwald’s and David Torresen’s various writings, including liner notes within Lee’s albums, supplied valuable insights and observations. I warmly thank my editors, Natalie Mandziuk, Michael Tan, and John Cerullo, for their guidance and help transforming this project from a long-incubating set of ideas into a published book. I lovingly thank my mother for introducing me to Peggy Lee’s music when I was particularly impressionable. I extend sincerest thanks to my husband, George, for his support and sustaining encouragement. I thank the hundreds of professional musicians with whom I have worked over the years—thank you for the magic we have co-created and continue to create together! I thank all my teachers—how blessed I have been to have been shaped intellectually and musically by some of the most outstanding minds and talents on the planet. Finally, I thank the thousands of audiences that have enjoyed and supported my music and the many fans who urged me to write this book. This is for you.
Tish called me one day and asked for an interview. I did not know her at the time. She was attending the University of Southern California and writing her doctoral dissertation on the “lyrical genius of Peggy Lee.” She asked if we could talk about my experiences working with Ms. Lee in the studios on recording projects and live performances. Her focus was on Peggy Lee’s creativity as a songwriter. We got together, and that led to the creation of not only the Peggy Lee Project, a touring show that highlights Peggy Lee as a songwriter, but also a wonderful friendship and professional partnership. In the ensuing years, Tish and I have recorded four CDs together and performed for live audiences nationally. The latest album, Tish Oney with the John Chiodini Trio: The Best Part, includes three songs that I co-wrote with Peggy Lee but that were never recorded by Peggy or anyone else.
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The slow, charming ballad “All I Need Is You” that Lee and the Goodman band recorded in May 1942 sounded as if it belonged to years gone by rather than to the leading styles of the day. Deftly sung by Lee (even in the passages befitting a soprano), the song included wide melodic leaps landing the singer in a higher vocal range than was usually performed in jazz and swing. A jazz or swing song’s performance keys were, and still are, generally selected with the singer’s spoken voice range in mind. This ensured that the lyrics came through clearly and differed from the emphasis of classic genres like opera, where the power of the voice was more important than the clarity of lyrics. Since jazz, swing, and popular singers’ voices were amplified in performance and recording, they could place a greater emphasis on lyrics. As this need to amplify one’s own voice quickly waned at the dawn of the technological age, voices with excess vibrato and projection fell out of vogue. By contrast, soft, sultry voices like Lee’s became popular, and gentler vocal stylization began to evolve among the popular, swing, and jazz set.
Along with many other bands, the Goodman band participated in war bond rallies in New York to assist with the war effort. Returning to New York to perform at the Paramount Theater in May 1942, Lee and Goodman wowed audiences with their renditions of “Where or When” and “Sing, Sing, Sing,” Goodman’s swing era anthem. Back in 1937 the Goodman band had recorded this Louis Prima standard, clocking the recording at over eight minutes—way past the usual three-minute limit for radio play. The song was instrumental in continuing the swing frenzy begun on August 21, 1935, at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. Goodman ushered in the swing era that evening with the national radio broadcast of his live concert at this colossal dance hall attended by twenty thousand dancers. With the help of AM radio’s long wavelengths traveling hundreds of miles farther than modern FM radio, and a string of DJs devoting their airtime to broadcasting the concert, the event blanketed the nation in swing. One of the most influential concert performances in music history, Goodman’s Palomar debut ushered in a whole new genre of popular music and made Benny Goodman one of the first American pop culture stars. Even though other bands (notably Duke Ellington’s) had been playing swing for years already, the public awareness and appreciation among white audiences was sealed that evening. Goodman later commented about the song: “‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ (which we started doing back at the Palomar on our second trip there in 1936) was a big thing, and no one-nighter was complete without it.”[10] Thereafter, Goodman’s audiences expected to hear the song whenever he appeared. New York’s Paramount Theater crowd responded with the usual appreciation accorded to this era-defining hit.
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