By the tender age of seventeen, Lee had grown restless in rural North Dakota. Her thirty-nine-year-old mother had died when she was four but remained a muse throughout the singer’s musical life. Growing up in a troubled household with her alcoholic father and abusive stepmother, Min Schaumber, with whom she had a very strained relationship, Peggy yearned for independence. Loving the new popular music, which was strongly tied to jazz and swing, and possessing relentless ambition, she auditioned for a spot with Sev Olson’s band in nearby Minneapolis, which led to a stint with a nationally touring dance band led by Will Osborne. She set off with a couple of bandmates for southern California as soon as an opportunity arose. In 1939 Lee managed to secure a performing date at The Doll House in Palm Springs and recalled that the noisy crowd would not quiet down enough for her to be heard over the din, so she instinctively sang more softly into the microphone: “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.”[3] In a later interview, Lee described the concept of dynamic contrast as “one of the interesting things to me about music in general—how to change the colors and the moods and how to build up like an ocean wave and let it wash away and then be very quiet.”[4] As patrons paused and became hushed in order to hear her, she discovered her knack for drawing listeners in by singing quietly instead of by increasing her volume. Fortunately for Lee, an influential hotelier, Frank Bering, witnessed this magical performance and offered Lee her next job at The Buttery Room, the nightclub inside his Ambassador Hotel in Chicago. It was in this room that Benny Goodman first heard Lee perform, shortly after his singer, Helen Forrest, had left the Goodman band. This stroke of good fortune placed Lee literally at the front of the most influential band of the swing era. Needless to say, her career was off and running.
Lee later described the sometimes difficult Goodman as a taskmaster whose musical demands were the highest of any bandleader in the industry. Goodman laid down strict rules each band member was expected to maintain including mandatory curfews, brutal tour schedules (one year the band performed fifty one-night-only concerts in succession, in different cities), and intolerance for imperfect musicianship. Goodman lived with music as his highest calling and took that calling very seriously. He expected his musicians to attain the highest possible level of musical execution for both live performances and recording sessions. While this may have created a difficult workplace situation for some, it lifted the musical quality of Goodman’s band to admirable heights.
At first glance, Peggy Lee may have appeared to be just one of many attractive female singers fronting important big bands of the early 1940s. When she first joined the Goodman band as a replacement for soprano Helen Forrest, Lee dutifully sang in those same high keys. In that year’s recordings, Lee’s high-pitched, youthful tone matched the lightness and sunny approach of many other leading big band vocalists. Her early success with a lighter, higher tone proved Lee’s versatility and raw talent, even without formal training or professional tutelage. When finally given opportunities to show off her lower, softer, bluesy approach though, her signature style began to bloom.
Lee first recorded with the Goodman band on the Okeh label owned by Columbia Recording Corporation. Her recordings from 1941 revealed the uncanny pitch precision, easygoing rhythmic sense, and relaxed delivery the artist would become known for throughout her life. Even with the higher relative range of this repertoire as compared with her later material, her exquisite tone quality was equal to or exceeded that of other popular singers of the period; plus she had an approach that was singular and original. She wasn’t just talented, though. She was unique. While often compared with Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee possessed an unequivocally lighter and more vibrant voice in the early phase of her career. The pure, youthful, and healthy voice in Lee’s 1941 recordings surprises those whose familiarity with Lee centers around her later radio hits from the 1950s and ’60s. Over time, smoking took its toll on her pure vocal sound, and its nascent clarity gave way to the darker, slightly husky quality for which she became famous.
One early recording, “Elmer’s Tune,” made in August 1941, sported a bouncy swing feel with a lightness and jovial quality that Lee’s teenaged voice suited perfectly. The chromatic melody proved to be no challenge whatsoever for the pitch-perfect singer. Benny Goodman’s lighthearted clarinet solo toward the end of the recording yielded a lovely response to Lee’s cheery vocal chorus. Later that month the band entered the recording studio again to lay down “I See a Million People (But All I Can See is You).” This song possessed a melody featuring a couple of surprising pitches and matching harmonic turns in its returning theme.
The standard song delivery for the Goodman band (and many others in the swing era) involved playing a song (or a portion of it) instrumentally first, with the entire orchestra, then transitioning to a section for leading in the vocal soloist, often facilitating a key change. Such was the case with “That’s the Way It Goes,” recorded in September 1941. Following an instrumental reading through the first two iterations of the opening theme during which Goodman played the melody, an extended transitional section preceded Peggy’s sung entrance. After Lee’s gentle vocal chorus displayed an even, well-produced tone, Benny Goodman and the band repeated the tune more forcefully with a short call-and-response clarinet solo alternating with the band’s answers. This coupling of roles functioned nicely as a coda to finish the song with a neatly arranged ending, furnished by the now legendary big band arranger Eddie Sauter.
As Lee gained more experience with the Goodman band and became more comfortable with her voice’s expressive qualities, she began to embrace the emotion of each new song. In October 1941, Lee and the Goodman band recorded Duke Ellington’s classic “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good).” Lee delivered a particularly feminine, pure rendition of this standard, in keeping with her youthfulness. Her musical precision and rich tone quality revealed her growing skill and ease with which she tackled the pressure of the recording studio. Although the simplistic approach to this bittersweet text sounded light and carefree in tone quality, the final eight bars suggested Lee’s innate connection to the song’s dark undertone. Demonstrating the journey from innocence in the sweet, mellifluous beginning section, Lee shifted to a voice of tragic experience in the final closing. Goodman’s swinging improvised solo dripped with jazz style and overt blues wailing appropriate for the King of Swing. The band also swung masterfully, with no hint of rushing or overplaying. The incredible control required for an eighteen-piece band to execute meticulously timed swing in a manner that eased off each note without affecting the tempo filled this recording with the authenticity exclusive to the top band from the swing era.
This recording represented the first of many songs to reach the popular music charts during Peggy’s involvement with the Goodman band. The single was released almost immediately after it was recorded and hit the music charts on the fifteenth of November 1941. Unlike today, songs or “sides” (three-minute single songs that occupied a whole side of a ten-inch-wide, 78-rpm record) were recorded and released relatively quickly, without the long processes of editing, mixing, and mastering that require many months of production in modern music recording. Recordings were presented to the public via 78-rpm singles, in jukeboxes, and on the radio as basically live versions of songs, even though a few takes might have been necessary to glean the best performance. Today even live albums are meticulously edited, mixed, and mastered before the public ever hears a note.
In the swing era, recorded music truly represented the newest offerings of modern songwriters, as songs may have been delivered by their composers or lyricists to bands on the same day they were to be recorded. Because bands were in the business of delivering the latest swing music to the public through both performances and records, frequent recording dates were the norm. Bands recorded a few times per month on average, and session musicians were paid modest fees for a day’s work. These musicians were, of course, expert sight-readers, being required to perform music they had never seen before with accuracy, grace, and expertise. Many