Customer Reviews

Fever: The Life and Music of Miss Peggy Lee

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This beautiful examination of Peggy Lee`s Life and music left me
with great admiration of Peter Richmond`s skills and talent. It
gives us a portrait of an amazing lady, who was not only a singer
but a complicated, intelligent person. The research behind the
book is breathtaking but never boring. In fact Richmond`s writing
at times is almost poetic-always interesting and exciting.
A really great read.

This story of the life and music of Norma Deloris Egstrom from North Dakota has given all Pegy Lee fans a far more complete version of the most talented singer songwriter of the 20th century than her own Autobiography. Not only has Peter Richmond captured ever nuance of Peggy's complex character but he also has painted a picture of the American music scene of the 30's, 40's and 50's in intimate detail.Some of her loyal fans, particularly those like myself from, England, may be dissapointed to find she had, like all icons with talent of the highest order, many flaws. It was, however, the mental and physical anguish she suffered as a young woman, that formed her character and propelled her into immortality.
I sincerley hope that her many fans in the USA will be lobbying to have Peggy Lee represented, Like her contemporaries, Benny Goodman,Count Basie, Billie Holliday etc, on a postage stamp in the Legends of American Music Series

I am from a past generation. Born in 1934. I had the chance to follow Peggy Lee for a number of years durning her life. The book helps me clearify some of the missing parts of her life. I love Peggy Lee and I have enjoyed the book.

Let me say upfront that I did not dislike Peter Richmond's book. I couldn't bring myself to give it less than three stars, for two reasons. One, as a portrait of one of music's all time greats, it's the best source out there to date. Two, it's clear to me that Richmond really, really tried to create the definitive biography of both Miss Peggy Lee and the real woman behind her. But Norma Deloris Egstrom and her alter ego deserve better than this.

Reading it, one does get something of a feel for who Peggy Lee was, or at least who Peter Richmond believes her to have been. But there are far too many instances where either his research got out of hand and he felt the need to throw in all sorts of details that really weren't necessary, or he mentions tidbits he discovered along the way but wasn't able to back up. As a result, the reader has to slog through all sorts of tangents that never go anywhere, notably a throwaway mention of Lee's trouble with the IRS in the early 1970s, followed several pages later by an unconvincing resolution regarding her handlers purchasing land in California as a tax shelter and never mentioned again. In the later chapters, Richmond refers constantly to Lee's declining health (which IS an important part of her life story) without ever really addressing the issue directly. This is understandable in such that he obviously wanted to respect Lee's own wishes with regards to references to her drinking and other unhealthy lifestyle choices. But it does leave the reader with an incomplete and often confusing picture, and if Richmond did not want to address such matters, he really shouldn't have referred to them at all. (This makes the passages where he does acknowledge her drinking problem all the more excruciating, notably his assessment of her disastrous 1970 White House performance.)

Then there is Richmond's perspective on Lee's place in the music business, which is occasionally fawning and nearly always somewhat distorted. I do agree with Richmond that Lee is just as important to jazz as the Beatles are to rock, but he drives that point home a bit too hard throughout the book. He is also prone to dismissing rock as youth-oriented noise much like music critics of the 1950s did. Besides this being a wildly outdated view, he does not appear to be aware that the style of music Lee did best met the same reaction a generation earlier, or that Lee herself did not subscribe to such a puritanical view of the new music. Richmond neither knows as much about rock history as he should (he refers at one point to 1963 as the beginning of the British invasion in the US), nor does he grasp its influence on Lee's career. Although he devotes several pages to the song after which he named the book, he manages to avoid acknowledging that it is for all intents and purposes a jazz-rock fusion song, or that the original version was straight up rock and roll. He also dances around the fact that Peggy Lee herself was friends with late 60s' rock and soul groups like the Fifth Dimension while dismissing their music as worthless schlock. Jazz purists might think this is well deserved, but Richmond is sometimes just as careless with his jazz history: his mention of Lee's performance at Louis Armstrong's funeral implies that Armstrong died two years before he did. Along the way, even his assessment of Lee's music is sometimes uneven; entire albums are never referred to at all.

There is a lot here, at least, but it just begs for a more serious student of music history to do a more serious job. Richmond himself refers constantly to "the Great American Songbook" throughout the book, mostly in the context of overestimating both the popularity of classic jazz songs in their own time and their loss of popularity since then. In the words of one such song, when it comes to a true appreciation of Miss Peggy Lee, "it'll have to do until the real thing comes along."

Book describes two Peggy Lee's. The sexy musically savy live entertainer, who controlled the crowd by singing softer and softer so they would have to stop talking if they wanted to hear her.

The other Peggy Lee was born to an alcoholic father and raised by a cruel step mom. A woman who never seemed happy with any of her husbands, though she remained friends with some after their break up. This part of book just scratches the surface at least with any particular relationship she had and why it was going bad. It seems to build to an overall character assesment based on all of her relationships and career - though I had to return the book to the library before I got to the end.

For me the book also described a third Peggy Lee. One who found her way in the musical world, meeting and performing with many great musicans in many of the hot jazz spots of the past. This was the most enjoyable part of the book as you travell back in time to visit with some of the jazz greats that my father loved and some lessor known ones that I met while listening to them with my father. It is also a story of how Peggy kept her career going into the 60s with the avent of rock & roll

You can tell the author is a real fan of Peggy Lee, as he promotes her artistry, innovation, sense of blues/jazz timing and phrasing above all others that have come before (and seemingly after). I share his dislike for modern and beebop jazz, but can't share his enthusiam for her and her music above all others, or for that matter rock & roll.

I was blown away when Gary Giddins wrote a serious bio of Bing Crosby and hoped that someone would do a similar trick for Miss Peggy Lee. Peter Richmond has done it. He covers all the ground from the song of the title to "Lady and the Tramp" to "Is That All There Is?" and beyond and writes for a popular audience, not for people in the music biz. I read this in two nights!

Wish there had been more info and/or details of her early recordings with Capitol and the Modern Jazz group, especially with Dave Barbour and Singletary doing Ain't Goin' No Place. However, the book as a whole is a feast of jazz inter-connections and clues to personality idiosyncrasies, in both Lee and many others.

I just finished reading this, and found it to be a complete and intriguing bio of Miss Lee. You will not want to put it down! She had an incredible life, and the author not only makes you feel as though you were there, but also gives mini bios of fellow musicians and peers of Miss Lee. I am now looking for Peggy's autobiography that she penned herself!

The cheapest sort of tawdry showbiz writing, where everyone is referred to by either their first name ("Benny," really?, rather than "Goodman"?) or as "the guy," and where song lyrics are quoted in the tiniest chunks (and pointlessly explained) so as to skirt copyright laws. I could put up with the grisliness of style, for the sake of the information, while the author was detailing Peggy Lee's rise to fame, but as he attempted to address her complicated middle years and sad decline, I found his gaudy shallowness downright insulting, and had to put the book down.

Until the day a writer who can write decides to set down an appropriate biography of this great and underappreciated singer, I'll just have to make do with her recordings, which tell us, ultimately, everything we need to know about her.

A wonderful glimpse into the life of the best songstress of the century... warm, insightful and dynamic... Just like Miss Lee!