Peggy Lee

She is best known for her role in the Walt Disney classic Lady and the Tramp, where she voiced Darling, Peg, and the Siamese cats, among others. In 1956, she received an Academy Award nomination for her role in the 1955 film Pete Kelly's Blues. That same year Lee was also nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award.

The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are pop music and jazz. Distinctions recorded are Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, star on Hollywood Walk of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame.

• Name — Peggy Lee • Birth Name — Norma Deloris Egstrom • Born — 26 May 1920 • Birthplace — Jamestown, North Dakota, U.S. • Died — 21 January 2002 • Place of death — Los Angeles, California, U.S. • Resting Place — Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery • Occupation — * Singer • songwriter • actress • Known for — * The Jazz Tree • Disney's Lady and the Tramp • Pete Kelly's Blues • The Jazz Singer • Children — 1

Lee was born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, United States, on May 26, 1920, the seventh of the eight children of Selma Emele (née Anderson) Egstrom and Marvin Olaf Egstrom, a station agent for the Midland Continental Railroad. Her family were Lutherans. Her father was Swedish-American and her mother was Norwegian-American. After her mother died when Lee was four, her father married Minnie Schaumberg Wiese. His family's original name was Ekström. Lee and her family lived in several towns along the Midland Continental Railroad (Jamestown, Nortonville, and Wimbledon). She graduated from Wimbledon High School in 1937. Lee began singing at a young age. In Wimbledon, she was the female singer for a six-piece college dance band with leader Lyle "Doc" Haines. She traveled to various locations with Haines's quintet on Fridays after school and on weekends. Lee first sang professionally on KOVC radio in Valley City, North Dakota, in 1936. She later had her own 15-minute Saturday radio show sponsored by a local restaurant that paid her salary in food. Both during and after her high-school years, Lee sang for small sums on local radio stations. In October 1937, radio personality Ken Kennedy, of North Dakota's most widely heard station, WDAY in Fargo, auditioned her and put her on the air that day, but not before he changed her name to Peggy Lee. In March 1938, at age 17, Lee left home for Hollywood, California. Her first job was seasonal work on Balboa Island, Newport Beach, as a short-order cook and waitress at Harry's Cafe. When the job ended after Easter, she was hired as a carnival barker at the Balboa Fun Zone. She wrote about this experience in the song "The Nickel Ride", which she composed with Dave Grusin for the 1974 film of the same name. Later in 1938, Lee returned to Hollywood to audition for the MC at The Jade. Her employment was cut short when she fainted onstage due to overwork and malnutrition. After she was taken to the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center she was told she needed a tonsillectomy. Lee returned to North Dakota for the operation. In 1939, Lee was hired to perform regularly at The Powers Hotel in Fargo, and toured with both the Sev Olson and the Will Osborne Orchestras. She was also again broadcasting at WDAY. When Lee returned to California in 1940, she took a job singing at The Doll House in Palm Springs. There, she developed her trademark sultry purr, having decided to compete with the noisy crowd with subtlety rather than volume. • Illustration — Lee, famous for her sultry singing voice, featured in a cigarette ad in 1953. I knew I couldn't sing over them, so I decided to sing under them. The more noise they made, the more softly I sang. When they discovered they couldn't hear me, they began to look at me. Then, they began to listen. As I sang, I kept thinking, "softly with feeling". The noise dropped to a hum; the hum gave way to silence. I had learned how to reach and hold my audience—softly, with feeling. While performing at The Doll House, Lee met Frank Bering, the owner of the Ambassador East and West in Chicago. He offered her a gig at the Buttery Room, a nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel West. There, she was noticed by bandleader Benny Goodman. According to Lee: She joined his band in August 1941 and made her first recording, singing "Elmer's Tune". Lee stayed with the Benny Goodman Orchestra for two years.

In 1942, Lee had her first top ten hit, "Somebody Else Is Taking My Place", followed in 1943 by "Why Don't You Do Right?", which sold more than one million copies and made her famous. She sang with Goodman's orchestra in two 1943 films, Stage Door Canteen and The Powers Girl. In March 1943, Lee married Dave Barbour, a guitarist in Goodman's band. Lee said: Will Friedwald has written: In 1944, Lee drifted back to songwriting and occasional recording sessions for Capitol Records, for which she recorded a long string of hits, many of them with lyrics and music by Lee and Barbour, including "I Don't Know Enough About You" and "It's a Good Day". Her recording of "Golden Earrings", the title song of a 1947 movie, was a hit throughout 1947–48. "Mañana", by Lee and Barbour, was her eleventh solo hit recording, and remained on the charts for 21 weeks, including nine at the top position. The song sold more than a million copies, and earned the Top Disc Jockey Record of the Year award from Billboard magazine. From 1946 to 1949, Lee also recorded for Capitol's library of electrical transcriptions for radio stations. An advertisement for Capitol Transcriptions in a trade magazine noted that the transcriptions included "special voice introductions by Peggy". In 1948, Lee joined vocalists Perry Como and Jo Stafford as a host of the NBC Radio musical program The Chesterfield Supper Club. She was a regular on The Jimmy Durante Show and appeared frequently on Bing Crosby's radio shows during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Her relationship with Capitol spanned almost three decades aside from a brief detour (1952–1956) at Decca. For that label, she recorded Black Coffee and had hit singles such as "Lover" and "Mister Wonderful". In 1958, she recorded her own version of "Fever" by Little Willie John, written by Eddie Cooley and Otis Blackwell. Lee created a new arrangement for the song, and added lyrics ("Romeo loved Juliet", "Captain Smith and Pocahontas"), which she neglected to copyright. Her version of "Fever" was a hit and was nominated in three categories at the 1st Annual Grammy Awards in 1959, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year. While Lee was in London for a 1970 engagement at Royal Albert Hall, she invited Paul and Linda McCartney to dinner at The Dorchester. At the dinner, the couple gave Lee a song they had written, "Let's Love". In July 1974, with Paul McCartney producing, Lee recorded the song at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, and it became the title track of her 40th album, her only one on Atlantic Records.

• Illustration — Photo of Peggy Lee and Danny Thomas from The Jazz Singer Lee starred opposite Danny Thomas in The Jazz Singer (1952), a remake of the Al Jolson film, The Jazz Singer (1927). She played an alcoholic blues singer in Pete Kelly's Blues (1955), for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Lee provided speaking and singing voices for several characters in the Disney movie Lady and the Tramp (1955), playing the human Darling, the dog Peg, and the two Siamese cats, Si and Am. She also co-wrote, with Sonny Burke, all of the original songs for the film, including "He's A Tramp", "Bella Notte", "La La Lu", "The Siamese Cat Song", and "Peace on Earth". In 1987, when Lady and the Tramp was released on VHS, Lee sought performance and song royalties on the video sales. When the Disney company refused to pay, she filed a lawsuit in 1988. After a prolonged legal battle, in 1992, Lee was awarded $2.3 million for breach of contract, plus $500,000 for unjust enrichment, $600,000 for illegal use of Lee's voice and $400,000 for the use of her name. Peggy Lee also wrote the lyrics for "Johnny Guitar" (with music composer Victor Young), the title track of the 1954 film, Johnny Guitar, which she sings partially at the end of the movie. During her career, Lee appeared in hundreds of variety shows, and several TV movies and specials.

Lee wrote or co-wrote more than 270 songs. In addition to her own material to sing, she was hired to score and compose songs for movies. For the Disney movie Lady and the Tramp, she co-composed all of the original songs with Burke, and supplied the singing and speaking voices of four characters. Over the years, her songwriting collaborators included David Barbour, Laurindo Almeida, Harold Arlen, Sonny Burke, Cy Coleman, Duke Ellington, Dave Grusin, Quincy Jones, Francis Lai, Jack Marshall, Johnny Mandel, Marian McPartland, Willard Robison, Lalo Schifrin, and Victor Young. Lee's first published song was in 1941, "Little Fool". "What More Can a Woman Do?" was recorded by Sarah Vaughan with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. "Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me)" was number one on the Billboard singles chart for nine weeks in 1948, from the week of March 13 to May 8. Lee was a mainstay of Capitol Records when rock and roll came onto the American music scene. She was among the first of the "old guard" to recognize this new genre, as seen by her recording music from the Beatles, Randy Newman, Carole King, James Taylor, and other up-and-coming songwriters. From 1957 until her final disc for the company in 1972, Lee produced a steady stream of two or three albums per year that usually included standards (often arranged quite differently from the original), her own compositions, and material from young artists. Many of her compositions have become standards, performed by singers such as Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, Natalie Cole, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Diana Krall, Queen Latifah, Barry Manilow, Bette Midler, Janelle Monae, Nina Simone, Regina Spektor, Sarah Vaughan and others.

Lee was married four times: to guitarist and composer Dave Barbour (1943–1951), actor Brad Dexter (1953), actor Dewey Martin (1956–1958), and percussionist Jack Del Rio (1964). All the marriages ended in divorce. On November 11, 1943, Lee gave birth to her only child, daughter Nicki Lee Foster (who died in 2014), in her marriage to Barbour. Lee learned Transcendental Meditation and said she was taught "by the Maharishi personally and that was a great honor."

In 1987, Peggy Lee was asked to help promote the first VHS release of Lady and the Tramp, for which she was paid an honorarium of $500. Lee contended Disney had breached the 1952 contract she had signed with the studio, which denied Disney the right to make "transcriptions for sale to the public" without her approval. Disney CEO Michael Eisner refused to pay Lee her share of the royalties. On November 16, 1988, Lee sued the Walt Disney Company for breach of contract, claiming that she retained the rights to transcriptions of the music, arguing that videotape editions were transcriptions. Her lawyers demanded $50 million in damages for compensation. In March 1991, Lee was awarded $2.3 million for breach of contract, plus $500,000 for unjust enrichment, $600,000 for illegal use of Lee's voice and $400,000 for the use of her name. From the $72 million Disney had earned in videocassette sales, by 1995, Lee's award was estimated to be four percent of the sales. In October 1992, the California Court of Appeals upheld the judgement that Disney had to pay Lee over $3 million in compensation. Though videocassettes did not exist when Lee signed her contract with Disney, she nevertheless had retained the rights to phonograph recordings and transcriptions of the film. Stephen Lachs, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, later ruled that videocassettes were considered under the category of transcriptions. In December 1992, the California Supreme Court denied a hearing on Disney's appeal of lower-court rulings, which upheld the studio had committed breach of contract.

• Illustration — The Peggy Lee bench-style burial monument Lee continued to perform into the 1990s, sometimes using a wheelchair. After years of poor health, she died of complications from diabetes and a heart attack on January 21, 2002, at the age of 81. Lee was cremated and her ashes were buried with a bench-style monument in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.

• Title — Notes — Peak Pop chart position — Date • "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good" — With Benny Goodman — 25 — 11/15/41 • "Winter Weather" — Duet with Art Lund with Benny Goodman — 24 — 1/10/42 • "Blues in the Night" — With Benny Goodman — 20 — 2/14/42 • "Somebody Else Is Taking My Place" — 1 — 3/7/42 • "My Little Cousin" — 14 — 4/11/42 • "We'll Meet Again — 16 — 5/23/42 • "Full Moon (Noche de Luna)" — 22 — 6/13/42 • "The Way You Look Tonight" — 21 — 6/27/42 • Why Don't You Do Right?" — 4 — 1/2/43 • "Waitin' for the Train to Come In" — 4 — 11/10/45 • "I'm Glad I Waited for You" — 24 — 3/30/46 • "I Don't Know Enough About You" — 7 — 5/25/46 • "Linger in My Arms a Little Longer, Baby" — 16 — 9/28/46 • "It's All Over Now" — 10 — 11/23/46 • "It's a Good Day" — 16 — 1/18/47 • "Everything's Moving Too Fast" — 21 — 2/8/47 • "Chi-baba, Chi-baba (My Bambino, Go to Sleep)" — 10 — 6/28/47 • "Golden Earrings" — 2 — 11/15/47 • "I'll Dance at Your Wedding" — 11 — 12/20/47 • "Mañana" — 1 — 1/24/48 • "All Dressed Up With a Broken Heart" — 21 — 1/31/48 • "For Every Man There's a Woman" — 25 — 2/28/48 • "Laroo, Laroo, Lili Bolero" — 13 — 4/3/48 • "Talking to Myself About You" — 23 — 4/17/48 • "Don't Smoke in Bed" — 22 — 5/15/48 • "Caramba! It's the Samba!" — 13 — 6/5/48 • "Baby, Don't Be Mad at Me" — 21 — 6/5/48 • "Somebody Else Is Taking My Place" — Reissue of 1942 single — 30 — 6/19/48 • "Bubble Loo, Bubble Loo" — 23 — 7/3/48 • "Blum Blum, I Wonder Who I Am" — 27 — 3/12/49 • "Similau (See-Me-Lo)" — 17 — 4/23/49 • "Bali Ha'i" — 13 — 5/14/49 • "Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend)" — 2 — 5/28/49 • "The Old Master Painter" — Duet with Mel Tormé — 9 — 1/7/50 • "Show Me the Way to Get Out of This World" — 28 — 8/26/50 • "(When I Dance with You) I Get Ideas" — 14 — 9/8/51 • "Be Anything (But Be Mine)" — 21 — 5/24/52 • "Lover" — 3 — 6/7/52 • "Watermelon Weather" — Duet with Bing Crosby — 28 — 7/26/52 • "Just One of Those Things" — 14 — 8/2/52 • "River, River" — 23 — 11/22/52 • "Who's Gonna Pay the Check?" — 22 — 5/23/53 • "Baubles, Bangles and Beads" — 30 — 12/5/53 • "Where Can I Go Without You?" — 28 — 3/13/54 • "Let Me Go, Lover" — 26 — 12/18/54 • "Mr. Wonderful" — 14 — 3/3/56 • "Joey, Joey, Joey" — 76 — 5/5/56 • "Fever" — 8 — 7/14/58 • "Light of Love" — 63 — 11/3/58 • "Sweetheart" — 98 — 11/24/58 • "Alright, Okay, You Win" — 68 — 1/26/59 • "My Man" — 81 — 1/19/59 • "Hallelujah, I Love Him So" — 77 — 8/18/59 • "I'm a Woman" — 54 — 1/5/63 • "Pass Me By" — Adult Contemporary chart — 20 — 3/13/65 • "Free Spirits" — 29 — 10/23/65 • "Big Spender" — 9 — 1/29/66 • "That Man" — 31 — 4/9/66 • "You've Got Possibilities" — 6 — 6/18/66 • "So What's New" — 20 — 10/15/66 • "Walking Happy" — 14 — 10/22/66 • "I Feel It" — 8 — 9/30/67 • "Spinning Wheel" — 24 — 5/3/69 • "Is That All There Is?" — 1 — 9/1/69 • "Is That All There Is?" — 11 — 9/27/69 • "Whistle for Happiness" — Adult Contemporary chart — 13 — 12/20/69 • "Love Story" — 26 — 2/7/70 • "You'll Remember Me" — 16 — 5/9/70 • "One More Ride on the Merry-Go-Round" — 21 — 10/3/70 • "Love Song" — 34 — 10/7/72 • "Let's Love" — 22 — 11/2/74

• Title — Notes — Peak Pop chart position — Date • Songs from White Christmas — With Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye — 2 — 1/1/55 • Songs from Pete Kelly's Blues — With Ella Fitzgerald — 7 — 9/17/55 • The Man I Love — 20 — 9/23/57 • Jump for Joy — 15 — 7/14/58 • Things Are Swingin’ — 16 — 12/8/58 • Beauty and the Beat — 19 — 9/12/59 • Latin ala Lee — 11 — 4/11/60 • Basin Street East Proudly Presents Miss Peggy Lee — 77 — 9/11/61 • Bewitching-Lee! — 85 — 8/25/62 • Sugar ‘n’ Spice — 40 — 11/17/62 • I'm a Woman — 18 — 3/9/63 • Mink Jazz — 42 — 7/27/63 • In the Name of Love — 97 — 9/26/64 • Pass Me By — 145 — 5/22/65 • Big Spender — 130 — 7/30/66 • Is That All There Is? — 55 — 12/13/69 • Bridge Over Troubled Water — 142 — 6/6/70 • Make It With You — 194 — 12/19/70

Lee was nominated for 13 Grammy Awards. In 1969, her hit "Is That All There Is?" won her the Grammy for Best Contemporary Vocal Performance. In 1995, she was given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She received the Rough Rider Award from the state of North Dakota in 1975, the Pied Piper Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers in 1990, the Ella Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society of Singers in 1994, the Living Legacy Award from the Women's International Center in 1994, and the Presidents Award from the Songwriters Guild of America in 1999. Other honors include induction into the Big Band Jazz Hall of Fame in 1992, the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1999, and the Songbook Hall of Fame from the Great American Songbook Foundation in 2020.

Peggy Lee was recorded at birth as Norma Deloris Egstrom. She also worked under the names Peggy Lee and Susan Melton. Her recorded language was English. She married Dewey Martin, Dave Barbour and Brad Dexter.