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Chapter 3

Capitol Hits and The Peggy Lee Show

Lee’s career as a Capitol Records artist continued to flourish and grow immensely. By 1947 she was enjoying regular session calls for Capitol, putting forth increasing numbers of hit records, and gaining national fame as a leading singer of popular music. One song hailing these transformations, “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” Lee recorded with Frank DeVol’s jazz orchestra in August of that year. Lee’s bluesy approach revealed her ability to embody traits of various blues singers who preceded her (from Bessie Smith’s vocal power to Billie Holiday’s inflections) as well as her talent for packaging those traits into her own unique style and sound. This unique, expressive style enhanced Peggy’s live performance polish and elicited invitations to appear as a guest on radio shows that later gave rise to television variety shows.

Radio shows were all the rage in the mid-1940s through the 1950s and were hosted by famous entertainers including Bing Crosby, Jimmy Durante, Woody Herman, and eventually, Peggy Lee. Highlights from Lee’s show often included her performances of songs associated with other artists, like Nat King Cole’s hit “Somewhere along the Way,” and Louis Armstrong’s “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.” Performances from hosted radio programs represented a crucial connection between leading pop musicians and their American fans. These shows finally gave way to widely popular television variety shows filmed before a live studio audience and hosted by stars such as Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Ed Sullivan, Dean Martin, and many others. Among a slew of interesting skits and other acts, these radio and TV variety shows broadcast hundreds of impromptu performances showcasing the top entertainers of the day.

On September 12, 1947, Lee joined fellow Capitol artists Johnny Mercer, Benny Goodman, Margaret Whiting, The Pied Pipers, and Paul Weston and His Orchestra at Radio Recorders in Los Angeles to record a new patriotic Irving Berlin song, “The Freedom Train.” This post-war song featuring an all-star cast of singers celebrated American freedom. The song experienced an unusually rapid turnaround between composition and commercial release, not only by Capitol Records, but also by its chief competitor, Decca. The latter studio enlisted Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters to provide an immediate recording for the airwaves. During a conversation with disc jockey Fred Hall, Lee shared a humorous story of this Capitol session during which uncontrollable giggling temporarily stopped the process:

And one time we had an all-star group of all the singers on the whole label on that record. And something happened. We got the giggles in the middle of trying to record this thing, and one would laugh, and then two more, and finally about ten of us were laughing, and it got to be where you can’t stop laughing. And we finally had to absolutely stop the session and take a half-an-hour break to get ourselves straightened out.^[1]

This recording provided short solos by each of the stars as well as a beautifully harmonized pop choral arrangement for them to sing together. Although the record may have had commercial potential, in her autobiography Margaret Whiting referred to it as a “bomb.”^[2] Even so, this recording survived as an example of the unified front American recording artists put forth to the public at large in the postwar years.

Throughout the summer of 1947, amid intermittent recording sessions, Lee hosted the second season of a radio show sponsored by Old Gold cigarettes titled Rhapsody in Rhythm. Broadcast on Wednesdays at 9:00 p.m. between June 11 and September 17, this show boasted Lee as hostess and female singer, sharing hosting credits with male singers Johnny Johnston (also signed to Capitol Records) and Buddy Clark. Jan Savitt and His Orchestra provided accompaniment for the singers as well as instrumental numbers in both classical style (with spiced up arrangements) and swing. The second season’s premiere received positive reviews from Variety magazine:

The 1947 edition of Old Gold’s summer show is fresh, easy to take and welcome. A good compilation of popular music items, it has variety in entertainers as in music styles, and is expertly put together, despite the disarming, engaging informal attitude of handling. (This) premiere started off smoothly, apparently effortlessly, in an easy-going introduction of participants . . . to set the summer’s mood and tempo. Johnny Johnston doubled as emcee and singer and did both well. His romantic style blended well with Peggy Lee’s sultry type of song.^[3]

The second season of Rhapsody in Rhythm comprised fifteen episodes, each a half hour in length. Unfortunately for modern fans, the episodes have not been made readily available, if they exist at all.

That year Peggy co-hosted the third season of The Summer Electric Hour with clarinetist/singer Woody Herman. Prior to this season the show’s music centered around opera and was therefore hosted by performers with operatic voices, but when the third season arrived, producers abandoned the operatic context and instead chose a contemporary pop slant. They hired Dave Barbour and His Orchestra to provide arrangements for Lee and Herman. Recordings still extant from those half-hour episodes include “The Lady from 29 Palms,” a comic duet for Lee and Herman featuring a swinging performance by Barbour’s group in front of a live audience. Lee performed the jazz standard “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” “Ask Anyone Who Knows,” and “Cecilia,” another duet with Woody Herman. During this collaborative episode Lee exhibited a perfect rhythmic groove while Herman’s harmony amply complemented Lee’s secure melodic lines.

Radio icon Bing Crosby extended no fewer than forty-nine invitations to Lee over eight years to join him as a guest on his popular radio show. The two shared several duets and scripted skits, giving Lee plenty of experience managing the challenges of performing for radio broadcasts. In the 1947–1948 season, comedian Jimmy Durante featured Lee as his radio show’s primary singer. Hired frequently to perform at both NBC and CBS studios, Lee held a corner on the radio market and became familiar with the ins and outs of that industry while she honed her studio session prowess at Capitol and built up her live performance skills in concert appearances.

Back in the recording studios at Capitol, Lee continued to churn out singles like “Sugar,” referencing the sugar rations of wartime, and “Golden Earrings,” which took a path through a minor key and expressed an exotic, melancholic journey of a gypsy. Here Lee demonstrated her ability to cast a spell throughout a song, reveling in a dark, foreign aural landscape. This recording experienced so much success that it became prized as one of the top three songs of 1947. It peaked at number two on the Billboard chart and ran for eighteen weeks.

“Them There Eyes” fit the bill for yet another jazz standard Lee recorded, albeit with descending smears distinctly reminiscent of Billie Holiday. This energetic arrangement lent itself nicely to Lee’s effortless and ebullient swing. Lee’s text-based improvisation on her second chorus exhibited her complete transformation of the song’s melody and rhythm in a climactic romp of expressive freedom. In text-based improvisation, the text is sung but the singer changes notes and rhythms, departing in varying degrees from the melodic and rhythmic organization dictated by the composer. Lee’s recording of “Them There Eyes,” particularly her second chorus, has remained a worthy study for aspiring jazz singers seeking to improvise without using scat syllables. Over the years, Lee became more and more adept at this style of jazz improvisation.

Lee performed a long string of songs on the radio through the summer of 1947, including several well-known staples of American popular song: Gershwin’s “Somebody Loves Me”; the romantic Van Heusen/Burke song “As Long as I’m Dreaming”; the classic “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” as a duet with Woody Herman; and the Barbour-Lee standby “It’s a Good Day.” In return, CBS showered upon Lee, Herman, and Barbour the hype often apportioned to radio stars via publicity photos and articles, promoting their Summer Electric Hour.

A couple of months following the close of the summer radio show, Lee joined ten Capitol Records instrumentalists in an unusual project titled “Ten Cats and a Mouse,” for which each performer played an instrument he/she was not known to play. Dave Barbour played trumpet and Lee played drums while the rest of the crew traded instruments among themselves. They cut two sides, “Ja-Da” and “Three O’Clock Jump,” which received favorable reviews even with the obvious handicap ascribed to each musician. The entire undertaking was formed as a response to the second Petrillo Ban on commercial recordings by union musicians. James Petrillo, the leader of the American Federation of Musicians, had instigated the 1942–1944 ban and enacted another in 1948 to try to obtain better royalties for musicians through pressuring record companies to improve compensation. Since musicians expected to be bound by these union rules after December 31, 1947, shenanigans surrounding the controversy caused various musical curiosities like this recording to be released in the autumn months in anticipation of the ban. Knowing the story behind the recordings made listening to them all the more pleasurable and humorous. The group’s passable performance on secondary instruments rendered the recording of “Three O’Clock Jump” an important moment in music history, which modern audiences and industry professionals would be wise to comprehend. The point was clear—that in order to attract the finest musicians, to maintain the highest musical standards, and to obtain the best recordings possible, musicians needed to be fairly compensated for their work, or else mediocre, substandard music should be expected.