The Peggy Lee Bio-Discography And Videography:
The Pre-Recording Period
by Iván Santiago-Mercado
Generated on Feb 16, 2012
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I. Peggy Lee's Pre-recording Career, 1934-1941
Peggy Lee was born Norma Deloris Egstrom on May 26, 1920. She began singing professionally around 1936, when she was 16. (Some sources place her professional debut in 1934, at the age of 14, but such a possibility lacks sufficient factual support at the present time.) For the next five years (1937-1941), the budding vocalist performed extensively in diverse music venues and with various types of backing, including piano, organ accompaniment, trios, small combos, and big bands. Thus Lee had already acquired solid experience in "the minor leagues" when she joined Benny Goodman's nationally famous orchestra in August 1941, thereby hitting "the big time." As the biographical capsules offered below will make amply evident, the teenager had pursued her profession of choice with an unflinching resolve that would pay off for the rest of her long career.
II. In The Beginning: Jamestown And Nortonville
The future Peggy Lee spent her childhood and adolescence in North Dakota, moving from Jamestown (1920-1928) to Nortonville (1928-1934) and Wimbledon (1934-1937). In her late pre-teens and early teens, the young Norma Deloris was employed in a variety of temporary jobs -- most frequently, as a farm hand, occasionally also as a babysitter. "I had my first job away from home when I was eleven," she said during an interview conducted in 1974. "I worked on a farm and I did just about everything – milking cows, housekeeping, taking care of a newborn baby – I pretended it was a doll ... the lady was quite ill. And so I was sort of a nurse too." Later, while in high school, Norma took the role of editor of the school paper. Moreover, the teenager often helped her father, a railway station agent, with tasks such as filling per diem reports and lugging lignite for the station's stoves. Decades later, people who had known her from childhood and adolescence would recall that she was "singing all the time" and trying to write tunes, too. According to the vocalist herself, singing had become her dream by the age of 10.
III. The High School Years: Wimbledon And Valley City
In the early 1930s, Norma Deloris Egstrom was an aspiring but professionally untested vocalist. Norma's singing experience in Nortonville had been limited to the school's glee club, the church choir, and a few assorted special occasions, such as the occasional recital, talent contest, birthday party, or PTA meeting. Fortunately, various professional opportunities arose after the teenager moved from Nortonville to Wimbledon, where his father had been temporarily re-assigned as manager of the town's train station.
For starters, Norma was hired as the girl singer of a five-piece college dance band whose leader was named Doc Haines. The band was based on nearby Valley City, which was the region's seat county and the town location of the college attended by Haines (Valley City State Teachers College). However, the band was not stationary, but played all around the Barnes County region. According to Peggy Lee's autobiography, she had met Haines “when he ... played Wimbledon (Grant Joos, the trumpet player was from there). It seemed everyone in Wimbledon always knew I was going to go someplace, and someone pointed me out to Doc and said, That’s our little Hollywood girl, you ought to use her.” Lee adds that Haines used to refer to her as his "little blues singer," a moniker that may give an indication of early leanings toward bluesy and melancholy ballads.
Whereas some sources indicate that Norma Egstrom began working with Doc Haines in 1934, other sources point to 1936 as the year of her hiring. Peggy Lee repeatedly gave the year as 1934. Here is, for example, a comment that she made during an interview conducted in 1984: "[B]ack in Wimbledon ... I sang in Valley City with Doc Haines and his group, which was another college band. A territorial band, they called it. I thought I was so sophisticated. I was only 14 and traveled with them for a while ..." Notwithstanding the clarity of this particular recollection, we should bear in mind that half a century had elapsed since the happening of the events in question. Among other possibilities, Lee's memory could have coalesced two events, such as the year of her arrival to Wimbledon (1934) and the year in which she became a band singer.
Oral stories and local newspapers do point toward 1936 as the likeliest year for the hiring, however. According to such sources, Norma arrived in Wimbledon in late July and stayed only through October 1934. (She would not return to town until January 1935.) For a variety of logistical reasons, a hiring during those three months of 1934 strikes me as unlikely, albeit not entirely out of the question. It does seems likelier that the hiring took place in 1936, and that the initial meeting (the one during which Egstrom was brought to Haines' attention) happened in 1934 or 1935.
Doc Haines' performing schedule involved mostly appearances at parties and in programs broadcast by Valley City's KVOC radio station, where Norma Deloris was also given her own 15-minute sponsored Saturday radio show. Many years later (1950), on the occasion of Lee's special visit to the city, KOVC station manager Bob Ingstadt checked the station's records, and found out the debut date of Egstrom's radio show: November 28, 1936 at 3:45.
At school, the gig with Doc Haines elicited concerns that Norma's ongoing education would suffer, but the young girl and her school's superintendent promptly came to a satisfactory arrangement. Miss Egstrom was permitted to take makeup tests and to do course workload in advance, so that her weekends could be freed for the extracurricular activities which she was avidly pursuing: singing on the radio in Valley City and traveling with Haines' band through some of the Barnes County area.
The earliest published notice of a public appearance by the singer has been uncovered by the current curator of the Barnes County Historical Museum, Mr. Wes Anderson. It was published in the December 31, 1936 edition of the Valley City Times-Record: "Miss Norma Egstrom of Wimbledon is visiting in Valley City this week. Possessed with a remarkable voice, she will sing at the Eagles New Years Eve party tonight. She has sung over KOVC." It is not clear if this notice points to her professional debut in public or if (as other sources suggest) she had already been singing publicly with Haines for some time.
Additionally, Norma was hired to sing at the dining room of the city's Rudolph Hotel, accompanied by The Dutch Room Serenaders. Both the dining room and the KOVC radio station were located in the hotel. (Any other details about that particular job remain unknown to me. The job was obviously circumscribed to weekends.)
According to various articles and biographical accounts, Norma also sang with The Jack Wardlaw Orchestra at some point during her high school years. Neither the singer nor banjoist Wardlaw are known to have verified this alleged collaboration, yet it is cursorily mentioned in a number of reputable texts. If it truly happened, their involvement may have been too short to merit much of a mention. (Perchance it consisted of one or two performances, as Wardlaw's traveling band was passing through town? Or perhaps it is fully a mistake.)
IV. Jamestown, Chapter 2
Norma Deloris graduated from high school in 1937, merely one day after she had turned 17. With high school no longer an obstacle, she fully set her sights on a singing career. To pursue this long-held dream, the teenager immediately moved to the region's bigger city, Jamestown, where she had actually been born and spent her first eight years. Therein, the 17-year-old divided her time between two jobs, one at a coffee shop and the other singing in the airwaves. Norma was heard on radio station KRMC, which was actually located in the same Gladstone Hotel where she had found employment as the coffee shop's relief girl.
V. Fargo, Chapter 1
Miss Egstrom's next move was to an even bigger city. In Fargo, she again combined radio work with manual labor, this time as a bread slicer and as a waitress -- barely allocating a few hours for sleeping.
Ken Kennedy, program manager of radio station WDAY, hired the teenager on the same day in which she auditioned. Since he also decided to put her on the air on that very day, Kennedy came up with a professional name for her on the spot: Peggy Lee.
The newly christened Peggy Lee was heard daily for fifteen minutes in a segment that was part of WDAY's Noonday Variety Show. Lee and the radio station's musicians also formed a quintet that billed itself as Four Jacks And A Queen. Furthermore, Lee became part of the station's Hayloft Jamboree, a dance-barn spectacle that traveled around town on a weekly basis, and for which Peggy assumed a farmgirl persona known as Freckled-Face Gertie. For those Hayloft Jamboree shows, she also sang sometimes with another local ensemble, which went by the name of Lem Hawkins And The Georgie Porgie Breakfast Food Boys. In addition to singing at WDAY, Lee took on assignments such as regularly filing the radio station's music materials, a task that familiarized her with the work of the great songwriters of the American songbook.
VI. Hollywood, Chapter 1
In early 1938, Lee made an even more ambitious move: a trip to Hollywood. Results were mixed. She initially found jobs only of the white collar type: as seller of gardenia flowers, short-order cook, waitress, even carnival barker. Eventually, the teenager was hired to sing at the Jade Supper Club in Hollywood Boulevard. Nevertheless, throat problems forced her to return to her hometown later that year and to undergo a tonsillectomy that was incompetently performed. The surgical procedure caused hemorrhaging and required hospitalization. Fortunately, her vocal chords were not irreparably damaged, although she would require additional surgery in upcoming years.
VII. Fargo, Chapter 2
After a short period of recuperation, Lee spent well over a year back at Fargo, working for WDAY again. In early January 1940, she also began singing six nights a week at The Powers Hotel's Coffee Shop, accompanied by a young organist named Lloyd Collins.
VIII. Minneapolis
Next, Peggy Lee moved to another big city. In Minneapolis, she regularly sang at the Radisson Hotel's Flame Room (and, non-regularly, at other venues) with the local Sev Olsen Orchestra, a nine-piece band. Lee was also heard on radio shows sponsored by Standard Oil and broadcast over the city's KSTP station. (WADAY's Ken Kennedy seems to have been the catalyst for the move to Minneapolis: "Ken Kennedy got me a job with his cousin ... Sev Olsen," explained Lee during in an interview conducted decades later.)
When the nationally-known Will Osborne Orchestra came to Minneapolis, Peggy Lee auditioned for them and got the job. She and the touring band left town on November 4, or, according to another source, on the second week of November 1940. The Fox Theatre in St. Louis became their regular performance venue. In Lee's own estimation, she spent about three months with the Osborne orchestra.
In early 1940, while still in St. Louis, Peggy Lee received a job offer from Raymond Scott, who had just assembled a touring band. (Best known as the composer of "Mountain High, Valley Low" and of oddly titled instrumentals such as "Dinner Music For A Pack Of Hungry Cannibals," Scott would go on to host the popular show Hit Parade, and in time would also become an inventor of various electronic devices. Much of his musical oeuvre became immortalized through its ample use in Warner Brothers' classic cartoons of the late 1930s and 1940s.)
Recurrent throat problems forced Peggy Lee not only to decline Scott's offer but also to take a leave of absence from her job with the Osborne orchestra. She had to undergo surgery once more. (The ailment was, in her own words, "a lump in my throat.") By the time that she recovered, Will Osborne's orchestra had temporarily disbanded.
IX. Hollywood, Chapter 2
X. The Peggy Lee Singing Style, Take 1
Later in 1940, Lee went back to Hollywood. She quickly resumed work at The Jade. After a short while therein, she moved to the tonier Doll House, where she sang with the house's Guadalajara Trio. Lee claims to have developed her fondness for soft singing at this establishment in Palm Springs. Paradoxically, singing softly proved an effective strategy in dealing with the typically noisy audiences that attended this dinner place. Faced with her personalized brand of relaxed, subtly-delivered singing, customers would generally feel compelled to quiet down and pay closer attention.
XI. Chicago
At the Doll House, Lee's performances were enjoyed by Frederick and Lois Mandel, a couple of visiting Chicagoans. He was one of the owners of Chicago's Mandel Brothers department chainstore, and had recently bought the Detroit Lions franchise. After watching Lee onstage, the Mandels talked to their friend Frank Bering, who was also in town with them. Bering co-owned Chicago's Ambassador East and West Hotels. It so happened that the facilities of the Ambassador West included an ideal venue for Lee: The Buttery Room, which specialized in romantic, intimate-sounding music.
After an audition, Frank Bering asked Peggy Lee to travel to Chicago and work at the Buttery on a regular basis. Lee and the quartet with whom she had auditioned (The Four Of Us) moved to the Windy City in 1941. She also signed with a managing agency.
At The Buttery in the summer of 1941, Peggy Lee's act was seen by a couple of well-known bandleaders who were playing in town: Glenn Miller and Claude Thornhill. Miller personally complimented Lee on her singing. Thornhill (and/or his agency) wanted her to join his band, but nothing came out of this preliminary proposal. (Lee surmised that her managing agency did not approve of the idea because Thornhill was signed to a different agency.)
XII. Benny Goodman
Another bandleader who came to see Peggy Lee at The Buttery was Benny Goodman. He did so at the request of his fiancée, Lady Alice Duckworth, who had attended one of Lee's previous performances. Mindful of Goodman's imminent need to hire a new canary for the band (his canary Helen Forrest had recently given a few weeks' notice), Lady Duckworth thought of Lee as a possible choice. In August of 1941, Goodman personally phoned Lee to offer her the job, which she accepted immediately.
The Goodman years (1941-1943) provided an "advanced learning experience" for Peggy Lee. It was with the clarinetist's band that she began on a definitive path toward national recognition. It was also with Goodman that Lee made her first recordings.
However, it should be noted that Peggy Lee's formative years had begun long before she joined The Benny Goodman Orchestra -- as shown in the paragraphs above. This long gestation period (1934-1941) is too often obscured in biographical accounts of the singer, which tend to overstress the significance of her apprenticeship with the Goodman band.
XIII. The Peggy Lee Singing Style, Take 2
Granted that it proved enormously important for the progress of her career, Peggy Lee's year and a half with Benny Goodman was nonetheless a step backwards in one important area of professional growth: the evolvement of a personalized style of interpretation. Overall, the singer's vocals with The Benny Goodman Orchestra exhibit little of her individual style -- little of the intimacy and bluesiness for which she would become known as a solo artist. The exceptions are the ballads that she did with Benny Goodman's small combos, "Where Or When" (December 24, 1941) and "The Way You Look Tonight" (March 10, 1942). I suspect that her soft, bluesy approach in both of those numbers exemplifies the style that she had previously cultivated in nightclubs, supper clubs, and smaller venues.
Peggy Lee's overall work as Goodman's canary can be best described as an adaptation to the demands that big bands and their audiences made on singers. Vocals were secondary to the instrumental parts. Furthermore, general audiences tended to expect a danceable tempo for most numbers, ballads included. In reaction to Goodman's inclusion of slow, romantic vocals in live concerts, concertgoers would in fact moan, "What's with all this balladry?" Music collector Dave Weiner tells the following story, which took place during a Goodman gig that extended from late December 1942 to January 1943:
"My uncle saw the [Benny Goodman] band there [at The Paramount Theatre, in New York] and was unimpressed by [Frank] Sinatra, whom he had seen previously with Dorsey. He remembers that Peggy Lee sang a very slow Where Or When with Benny Goodman, and was booed by some hecklers who yelled, 'You stink!' Goodman stopped playing, stepped to the mike and told the audience to be quiet - then he swung into Why Don't You Do Right and cheers erupted for her and the band."
XIV. "These Foolish Things"
Also indicative of Peggy Lee's early stylistic leanings is a bluesy-sounding 1942 version of "These Foolish Things" that she performed with The Benny Goodman Orchestra, and which has been preserved as part of one radio broadcast. "These Foolish Things" was in fact the song that Lee had chosen, years earlier, for her audition at Fargo's WDAY radio station. It was moreover one of the numbers that she sang at The Buttery Room on the night when Goodman came to see her act. Hence "These Foolish Things" qualifies as a fundamental piece from the early years of Peggy Lee's career.
XV. Songs From Peggy Lee's Pre-Recording Period
The following tunes are on record as having been sung by Peggy Lee before her days with The Benny Goodman Orchestra. In the majority of cases, she herself confirmed to have interpreted them:
1. "Body And Soul"
audition number for The Sev Olsen Orchestra
2. "Clouds"
music contest, 1937
(an Ernest Charles composition)
solo (not group) vocal rendition
3. “Come Sweet Morning” ("Viens Aurore")
high school graduation commencement ceremonies, 1937
(presumably the English version by R. H. Elkin)
4. "Deep In A Dream"
frequent request at The Powers Hotel Coffee Shop; accompanied by organ
5. "Deep Purple"
probably sung in 1939, when the lyric became a hit, and in the ensuing two years
6. "Goody Goody"
Lee implied to have sung it at WDAY
7. "I Can't Give You Anything But Love"
audition number for The Will Osborne Orchestra
8. "I Never Had A Chance"
a favorite as a very young child
9. "The Glory Of Love"
amateur contest, around 1935
10. "Heaven"
a favorite as a very young child
11. "His Coming" ("Eh Ist Gekommen")
music contest, 1937
(a Robert Franz - Friedrich Rückert composition)
12. "I Thought About You"
Lee implies to have sung it at The Powers Hotel Coffee Shop, and to have considered it a favorite
13. "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen"
semi-classical Sunday matinee at the Powers Hotel Coffee Shop
14. "Little Sir Echo"
allegedly sung, as a lullaby, to a child neighbor, in Fargo
15. "The Man I Love"
probably at WDAY; also as an audition number for Frank Bering
16. "Moonglow"
a favorite as a child; also sung while with The Doc Haines Orchestra, 1934
17. "The Music Goes Round And Round"
frequent request at The Powers Hotel Coffee Shop; accompanied by organ
18. "Solitude"
a favorite as a child
19. " 'Tain't What You Do"
sung at The Powers Hotel Coffee Shop; accompanied by organ
20. "These Foolish Things"
audition song (see comments in this page's previous sub-section)
21. "Twilight On The Trail"
amateur contest, around 1935
22. "Wishing (Will Make It So)"
an avowed favorite of Lee's; thus I am presuming that she sang it
23. "Would God I Were A Tender Apple Blossom"
semi-classical Sunday matinee at the Powers Hotel Coffee Shop
24. "You Oughtta Be In Pictures"
audition for KVOC and The Doc Haines Orchestra, 1934
25. "Thanks For The Memory"
another avowed favorite of Lee's; probably sung around 1937 or 1938, when the song was brand new, and in ensuing years
26. "You're A Little Sweet Heartache"
allegedly sung, as a lullaby, to a child neighbor, in Fargo
Regrettably, none of the singer's vocals from the 1934-1940 period are preserved. Peggy Lee's earliest extant performances date from her years with The Benny Goodman Orchestra (1941-1943).
XVI. Sources And Reliability
Weighing heavily in my decision to put this page together was my strong impression that Peggy Lee's early years have not been succinctly and reliably documented. Generally, writers of previous accounts have tended to consult a minimal number of the sources available. They have also taken for granted the veracity of those sources. From my viewpoint, accuracy should not be taken for granted. Again and again, I have found out that primary sources disagree on the order and chronology of certain biographical events.
Hence I have atempted to base this page's account on a collage of all the sources at my reach. Of course, and since I too have needed to make choices as to which sources are most trustworthy, my account might not be free of factual errors. I hope that corrections will come forth as time goes by. The main purpose of the page is precisely to have all the extant, divergent sources collated into a single text which can be modified as more and better documentation turns up.
Of all the extant sources, preponderance should obviously be given to Peggy Lee's autobiography. Granted that her approach to chronology tends to be approximate rather than exact, I have found no glaring errors or inconsistencies in Lee's own account of her early years. In addition to the autobiography, I have paid close attention to the dozens and dozens of newspaper and magazine interviews that have been published over the decades.
I have also consulted Peter Richmond's biography of the singer, and have compared his chronology against the pertinent sections of Lee's autobiography and interviews. Richmond's account is valuable because he interviewed residents of the towns in which Norma Deloris Egstrom (Peggy Lee) lived during her early years. He also seems to have received worthwhile documents (e.g., photocopies of 1930s newspaper clippings) from local individuals and institutions invested in preserving the history of the North Dakota towns where Egstrom spent those formative years.
Wes Anderson is among the people who are very active in the promotion of the aforementioned historical effort. The curator of the Barnes County Historical Society and Wimbledon's Community Museum, Anderson has regaled Lee fans with a variety of newspaper clips about the young Miss Egstrom. Over the last few years, he has been posting them in the bulletin board of the official Peggy Lee website. I myself re-read them shortly before the last major update of this page (February 2012), with the intention of incorporating some notable bits above. Fans of the singer also owe to Anderson the upload of a 1950 clip, which shows visiting Peggy Lee as grand marshall of a winter parade in Valley City (the county seat of Barnes County).
XVII. Appendix: Peggy Lee And The Midland Railroad Project, 2012
Readers interested in Norma Deloris Egstrom's early life should be made aware of the ongoing restoration of Wimbledon's Midland Continental Depot, which was Norma's home and workplace during some of her adolescent years. Therein she worked in "tasks such as filling per diem reports and lugging lignite for the station's stoves" (per Peter Richmond's biographical description). The depot's second floor served as Norma's actual residence for the duration of her stay in town.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Wimbledon's Midland Continental Depot dates back to 1913 and is the only surviving Midland Continental Railroad station. Once it ceased its operations in 1970, the structure did not re-open until the 1990s, when it became a museum facility whose limited funds did not allow for anything better than a humble, limited operation. But that was then. Now the structure is getting ready to re-open in grand style.
As of this writing (February 2012), the restoration of the depot is well into its final phase. The near-completion of the project has been possible thanks to the volunteers who comprise the Wimbledon Community Museum, and to the donations which they have received. A 501(c)3 organization in a town with a population of 216 (according to the Twenty-third United States Census, conducted in 2010), the museum has gratefully dedicated a page to those donors. (Donations and other incoming messages of support are handled by Depot Treasurer Mary Beth Orn at mary_beth_orn@hotmail.com ).
Likely to take place in a few months from now (perhaps in late May, around Lee's birthday, or otherwise within the ensuing months), the grand opening of the restored facilities should be of particular interest to those of us who are Peggy Lee fans. The space is slated to be extensively dedicated to Lee. Display of memorabilia, playing of her music, and professionally prepared exhibitions about her life are expected to be the focus at opening time. The second floor has already been restored to reflect Lee's living quarters back in the 1930s (including vintage clothing, period hardware, antiques, etc.). There are also tentative plans to show at some point what Wes Anderson described some time ago as an "active video oral history project with about 160 interviews completed to date," a fair number of them involving local recollections of Peggy Lee. The project has the blessing of Lee's family, including her granddaughter Holly Foster-Wells, who is based in Los Angeles. Foster-Wells told the Fargo-Moorehead periodical In Forum that Peggy Lee "was very proud of her North Dakota roots and she always wanted to help give back to North Dakota in some way, and so we feel that way. I do hope the people go out and support the museum, otherwise these buildings get torn down and forgotten.” (The full article, dating back to 2011, when the restoration was in the second of its three phases, can be read at the newspaper's website.)
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