3 "fangirl, completist, positive" stars !!

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and Rowman and Littlefield for an ecopy. I am providing an honest review. This was released June 2020.

My partner and I decided to use this book as a listening project. Thanks to Spotify we have listened to over 300 Peggy Lee songs and added at least 200 to our playlists. I would read to us and then we would go ahead and listen to album after album.

I was never a huge fanboy of Ms. Lee but was quite familiar with her 1950s and 1960s music through the admiration my auntie would have of her. I remember her baking in her kitchen and singing jazz standard after jazz standard many sung by Peggy Lee. She also took me to see Ms. Peggy Lee in Detroit when she was part of Sondheim's Side by side...I was 8 or nine years old. That was very exciting but my memory fails me as to my experience

The author is a jazz singer and musicologist and did her dissertation on Ms. Lee's original song output which eclipsed 250 songs. Ms. Lee was tireless and tenacious and was a singer, songwriter ,arranger, lyricist, talk show host and actress. She sang swing, jazz, blues, broadway and later pop.

Ms. Oney writes a glowing overview of Ms. Lee's output with various amounts of detail. The biographical sketch is very light with a focus on her artistic output. At times it felt tedious and with a lack of any real criticisms. If we had not been listening to the albums this may have been rated lower. Having said that, Ms. Oney knows her stuff inside and out. I would only recommend this book to singers and Peggy Lee diehards. I will add her autobiography to my tbr. Fun fact: Jim Henson created Miss Piggy as a tribute to her.

The book is a solid three stars but our listening project was five stars !

I found this book to be full of information about a woman that I grew up listening to. What I did not know though was that she also wrote songs and some for movies. One of her most famous ones was “Lady and the Tramp”. That was very interesting information.
Here the book follows her life from Jamestown North Dakota to then singing with the Benny Goodman Band then leaving with another band member to marry they moved to Hollywood. Here is where she would write for movies and star in some and also co-write with other people and come out with other albums. “New American Blues” and “Pete Kelly Blues” would be two big records for her. She would write three songs for the movie “Lady and the Tramp” the title song which she sang, the Siamese cat song, and “He’s a Tramp”. This I did not know. She would later co-write a song with Duke Ellington and also Cy Coleman. Still her rendition of the song “Fever” from 1958 which is still a fantastic song and one that I remembered her from. Once I learned about her I then knew that I had heard her also growing up for my father listened to Benny Goodman and so she was one of the early singers. The information about her songwriting I did not know and was glad to find out. Overall a very good book about a wonderful singer.

I often shy away from reading biographies about people I truly admire, out of fear I will find out something that will tarnish my thoughts of them. This biography of Peggy Lee however, was so refreshing. Yes, it gave an account of her life and all its ups and downs, but it also went a little deeper and told more about her musical gifts. I had no idea she was such an accomplished lyricist - over 200 songs to her credit!
A wonderful biography about Ms. Lee and her many contributions to the arts.