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May 5, 2006
TT: Flashback
I just finished reading Peter Richmond's Fever: The Life and Music of Miss Peggy Lee. I wish it were better--it is, like most pop-music biographies, gushingly overwritten and musically underinformed--but at least it's thorough, and when you finish reading it you'll know a whole lot more about Peggy Lee than you did when you first picked it up.I suppose it's possible that some readers of "About Last Night" have never heard a Peggy Lee album. If you're among them, try this one, which is a pretty good and fairly wide-ranging complilation of some of her best-known records. Among other things, it contains Lee's greatest hit, "Fever," about which I wrote for the New York Times four years ago, the Sunday after she died. I didn't include this piece in A Terry Teachout Reader because it's too short, but I like it anyway, even though I was fighting a frighteningly tight deadline and didn't have any time for second thoughts. I hope you like it, too.
* * *
Peggy Lee taught me all about sex. I was twelve at the time, and had just made the earth-shaking discovery that my father's record collection was of more than merely historical interest. This was in 1968, the year of the White Album, and I was still trying to figure out how to play "Rocky Raccoon" on my brand-new guitar, but I was also chewing my way through the selected works of Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, whose recording of "Fever" was--shall we say--instructive.
Not that she was obvious about it, or anything else. If a Hitchcock blonde could have raised her voice in song, then Peggy Lee, who died last Monday at the age of eighty-one, would have sounded pretty much like that, cool and self-possessed and...amused. But even at twelve, I got the message, and then some: what the lady on the record had in mind was pretty much what I had in mind twenty-four hours a day, except that her point of view was more informed. That was when I realized my father knew a thing or two about music.
Thirty-four years later, I know a lot more about Peggy Lee, the English division of EMI having finally deigned to transfer the best of her albums to compact disc. I now know that "Fever" was the least of her. She was exquisite--there is no other word for her. She floated atop a rhythm section like a soap bubble on a warm breeze, never raising her alto-flute voice a decibel more than absolutely necessary in order to get the exact effect she intended. She was a smart singer, the very opposite of all the cruel jokes some jazz instrumentalists like to tell about the women with whom they so often grudgingly share a bandstand. She chose her material with painstaking care, writing some of the best of it herself, and when she sang a song, it usually stayed sung. Other people do "Don't Smoke in Bed" and "I've Got Your Number" and "You Came a Long Way from St. Louis," but when I hear them in my mind's ear, hers is the voice I hear.
I know all that--and yet when I learned of her death, the first thing that popped into my head was a dirt-plain bass-and-drum riff and a soft, sly voice half-whispering "Never know how much I love you/Never know how much I care/When you put your arms around me/I get a fever that's so hard to bear." I didn't need to go looking for that record on my shelves: it was burned into my memory, together with a mental picture of the beautiful woman who sang it. I remember how sure of herself she sounded, sure enough--and strong enough--to smile at the thought of playing with fire. Is this really what women are like? I wondered, and decided I'd better find out.
That's quite a lesson to have learned from a three-minute single--but, then, Peggy Lee was quite a teacher.
Posted May 5, 2006 12:00 PM
