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  • 1941-1943:   The Goodman Years (Columbia, Okeh)
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  • 1948-1952:   The Capitol Years (Part 3)
  • 1952-1957:   The Decca Years
  • 1957-1959:   The Capitol Years (Part 4)
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• TRANSCRIPTIONS
  • 1945   MacGregor Transcriptions
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• MEDIA PERFORMANCES
  • Overview: Peggy Lee Onstage And On Film, Radio, And Television
  • Radio: Peggy Lee's Rhapsody In Rhythm
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  • Photos: Albums Of Radio Broadcasts
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  • Photos: Various-Artists Compilations, Part I (Capitol Anthologies Excluded)
  • Photos: Various-Artists Compilations, Part II (Capitol Anthologies Only)
  • Photos: Various-Artists Compilations, Part III (Serialized Capitol LPs)
  • Photos: Various-Artists Compilations, Part IV (Serialized Capitol CDs)
  • Photos: Various-Artists Compilations, Part V (Capitol Promos & Retrospectives)
  • Photos: Various-Artists Compilations, Part VI (Retail & Specialized Labels)
  • Photos: Various-Artists Compilations, Part VII (Christmas Albums)
• MISCELLANEA
  • Over One Thousand Recordings: A Complete List
  • Unissued Recordings And Unconfirmed Record Deals
  • Various-Artists Compilations
  • British Issue Listings
  • Foreign Issue Listings
  • Essay About The Song Why Don't You Do Right?
  • Essay About The Song Mañana
  • Essay About The Recording Of Lover
  • Essay About The Song Fever
  • Essay About The Song Is That All There Is?
  • Research About The 1944 Ara Session
  • Research About The 1946 Disney Session
  • Research About The 1950 Snader Telescriptions
  • Research About The 1957 Nelson Riddle Singles
  • Research About The 1959 The Beauty And The Beat Dates
  • Research About The 1961 Basin Street East Dates
  • Research About The 1983 Broadway Show Peg
  • Overview Of The Benny Goodman Years
  • Overview Of Bing Crosby's Radio Career
  • Overview Of Capitol's Earliest Years
  • Overview Of Capitol's Early-Stereo Years
  • Overview Of Capitol's Record Club Years
•  

Peggy Lee's Bio-Discography:
The Capitol Transcriptions
by Iván Santiago-Mercado

Page generated on Apr 1, 2017

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Preliminary Notes

Contents: Peggy Lee's Radio Sessions For Capitol. The purpose of Capitol's Transcription Library Service was to produce records exclusively for radio airplay (rather than for commercial sale). Transcription records were distributed over a network of radio stations which subscribed, for a fee, to this "library" service. The enterprise operated from 1945 to 1953. Peggy Lee's recording activity for the service was circumscribed to a 3-year span (1946-1949), during which she turned out a total of 72 masters, spread over 11 transcription sessions. In addition, Lee recorded some miscellanea that radio stations were free to play before and after her transcription numbers (e.g., spoken introductions, a few promotional spots, a personal theme set to music). For other specifics about Capitol's Transcription Service, and for general details about the commercial release of Lee's transcription output, see this page's final note. My thanks to Adrian Daff for his very generous provision of the ads pictured throughout this page.

Organization: Chronology, issues, recommendations. The 11 aforementioned Capitol transcription sessions are chronologically discussed below. Under each Peggy Lee transcription performance, a list of commercial issues has been chronologically arranged as well, by year of release.  I aimed at listing every single issue (i.e., LP, CD, etc.) in existence, with the following exceptions:  various-artists compilations, foreign editions of domestic issues, and MP3 files. (The first two categories are covered separately, within the miscellaneous section of this bio-discography. As for the MP3 category, I have chosen to make very limited mention of such a format in my work; I consider it a non-physical configuration of inherently poor sound quality and ephemeral issue production.) Not surprisingly, some of Lee's Capitol transcription performances have been released so many times that the lists under them are quite long. In the present page, such lengthy lists have been subjected to a "hide-or-reveal" option: if a performance has been released more than three times, its full list of issues will be displayed only after you click on a blue arrowhead that has been strategically placed next to the third issue. Finally, all but one of Lee's 72 Capitol transcription performances were optimally issued in the Mosaic set THE COMPLETE PEGGY LEE & JUNE CHRISTY CAPITOL TRANSCRIPTION SESSIONS, whose title I have put in uppercase and boldface to signal that it is the recommended issue for this material. On the matter of worthwhile issues, you may also want to explore this pictorial page, particularly its second section.

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Capitol Miscellanea: Non-Singing Transcription Discs Featuring Peggy Lee

1. Capitol's X Series
As already mentioned, radio stations which subscribed to Capitol's Transcription Library Service had the option of assembling a full Peggy Lee show by themselves. To do so, they needed not only transcription discs containing her songs but also discs with supplementary material. Such supplementary discs were part of the service's so-called X series.

2. Capitol X-16: Themes [Transcription Disc]
The above-discussed transcription disc X-16 is an example. After receiving it, subscribers made use of this disc by playing its relevant tracks before and after performances by Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, and Enric Madriguera. (The performances themselves were from Capitol's transcription disc library, of course.)

3. Capitol X-32: Voice Tracks [Transcription Disc]
Also from Capitol's aforementioned X transcription series, disc X-32 is dedicated to patter and public announcements. Radio stations had the option to play this material along with Peggy Lee's transcription performances. (Material of this type probably helped to create the illusion that she was actually present at the station, and singing the numbers at the time of the broadcast.) On one side, the disc contains the following tracks:

a) Voice Intro No. 1. Introductory patter by Lee, starting with the word "tonight." Length: 10 seconds.
b) Voice Intro No. 2. Introductory patter by Lee, starting with the word "today." Length: 9 seconds.
c) Voice Intro No. 3. Lee patter, to the effect that the song about to be played is a listener's request. Length: 14 seconds.
d) Voice Intro No. 4. Lee patter, suitable for playing before any of her songs. Length: 10 seconds.
e) Voice Intro No. 5. Lee patter, also suitable for playing before any of her songs. Length: 13 seconds.
f) Voice Intro No. 6. Lee refers to her accompaniment, Four of a Kind. Length: 9 seconds. (This is the only voice intro that mentions Four Of A Kind. Some of the other intros mention that the accompaniment is by Frank DeVol's Orchestra.)
g) Voice Intro No. 7. Lee talks as if she were responding to an announcer's introduction. Length: 14 seconds.
h) American Red Cross Spot No. 1. Lee promotes the Red Cross cause. Length: 27 seconds.

The other side of disc X-32 duplicates the exact same eight tracks. The disc's entire contents remain commercially unissued, but patrons of the Library of Congress can listen to the library's copy. Since no singing is featured, this discography's database does not include the contents of disc X-32 anywhere, except in this special note.

4. Capitol Dem-R 1-4: A Sampler [Transcription Disc]
Also at the Library of Congress is a set of 2 discs which the library describes as "demo recordings of sample selections by Capitol talent, distributed for checking purposes, not for broadcast." Presumably, these are promotional samplers which gave radio stations the opportunity to listen and pick which artist(s)' discs they wanted to lease. The 13 artists featured in these 2 discs are identified as The King Sisters, Jan Garber And His Orchestra, Peggy Lee with the Four of a Kind, Enric Madriguera and His Orchestra, Gene Krupa Jazz Trio, Hal Derwin, Gene Krupa And His Orchestra, The George Kast Ensemble, Tex Ritter, Julius Toldi And His Salon Orchestra, David Allan, Paul Weston And His Orchestra, Del Porter And His Sweet Potato Tooters. The discs' matrix numbers are Dem-1-r and Dem-2-r in one disc, Dem-3-r and Dem-4-r in the other disc. The prefix "Dem" probably stands for "demonstration," the "r" for "record."

5. Frequency Test Records [Transcription Disc]
Yet another Capitol transcription disc in which Peggy Lee participates is one simply titled "Frequency Record." It bears the legend specially recorded by the Capitol Library Engineering Dept., The 26th Annual NAB Convention, Los Angeles, California. Voice: Peggy Lee. No identification number appears to be in it. Online descriptions of this item call it a diagnostic test record in which Peggy Lee announces the (Hertz) frequencies. On the physical label of the disc itself, it is stated that the frequencies start at 10,000 cycles. Incidentally, this disc could well be the rationale for Lee's claim, made in her later years, that her listening capability had been tested in an experiment.) I should also point out that I have not listened to this disc.

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GENERAL NOTES

Capitol's Venture Into The Radio Transcription Business (And Peggy Lee's Output For This Service)

Transcription companies had as their primary activity the making of music exclusively for radio airplay, which subscribing stations received in the form of discs (mostly 16 inches in diameter, and unavailable to music-buying listeners). The discs were not sold to radio stations, but leased for a fee, as part of a business transaction that involved the rotation of those discs among participating stations, followed by their disposal after a stipulated airplay date. Some transcription companies functioned fully as independents, whereas others had permanent or temporary ties to commercial record companies (e.g., Thesaurus to RCA, World to Decca).

During its earliest years of operation, Capitol Records had ties to the MacGregor transcription company, or vice versa. In his essay for the booklet of The Complete Peggy Lee & June Christy Capitol Transcription Sessions, Will Friedwald explains that "[i]nitially, Capitol both rented studio space from MacGregor and permitted its artists to do their transcriptions for their company." But, by 1945, Capitol had become "well-heeled enough to afford to start its own transcription service, gradually snapping up the contracts of their own artists as soon as they expired with MacGregor ..."

Capitol's earliest transcription sessions took place on April 14 and 23, 1945. They were country dates, credited in the logs to guitarist Wesley Tuttle. Also doing Capitol transcriptions during the initial year were the following artists (herein listed chronologically, starting with the act who followed Wesley Tuttle): Shug Fisher (April 25), Tex Ritter, Buddy Cole (June 8), Frank DeVol (also June 8), Four Of A Kind (June 19; presumed to have featured Dave Barbour on guitar), Hal Derwin, Paul Weston And His Orchestra, The King Sisters, Stan Kenton (November 27), and June Christy with The Kentones, which also featured Dave Barbour on guitar (December 13).

Joining Capitol's transcriptions service in 1946 were Alvino Rey (January 9), Merle Travis, Jack Guthrie, The Dinning Sisters, Gene Krupa And His Orchestra, The King Cole Trio (March 20), Duke Ellington And His Orchestra (March 28), Uncle Henry's Kentucky Mountaineers, Karl & Harty, Skitch Henderson, Pee Wee Hunt, The Dinning Sisters, Peggy Lee (May 14), Billy Butterfield, Lou Busch, Wally Fowler, Louis Castellucci, Victor Arno, Johnny Mercer (ca. October 15), and Clark Dennis. About a dozen more acts did work for the service in subsequent years; curiously, about half of them were vocal groups (The Mellomen Quartet, The Jordanaires, etc.)

Formal announcements of the service's creation were made in early 1946. For instance, the March issue of Capitol News states that "Capitol Records has formed the Capitol Transcription Service, a division of Capitol Records, with program service for radio stations throughout the nation," and proceeds to identify the top names in charge of the operation. Disc jockey Don Otis had been appointed as program director, Lee Gillette as head of programming production, and Walter Davidson as head of national sales and general manager of the division. The magazine's writeup was essentially an advance notice, because the service would not become officially available to potential subscribers until July 1, 1946. By that time, Capitol expected to count with over 1,500 transcription recordings on its library, and 500 more were scheduled to be recorded and incorporated the library before the beginning of the following year.

The fact that the service's earliest dates (by the aforementioned Wesley Tuttle, in 1946) belonged to the country field might have had something to do with Lee Gillette's background in that genre. He remained closely involved with the service until mid-1948. In August of 1948, he was given a new title: director of folk and western repertoire. Gillette's friend Ken Nelson (like him, a former disc jockey and music director at Chicago's WJJD station) was then hired to essentially take over his duties in Capitol's transcription department. Remaining in that position for the remainder of the department's existence, Nelson himself would transition to Capitol's country music division, where his skills as director of the division and leading producer became well known.

"By the post-war period, the transcription services had also settled on the idea that these discs would become a permanent musical library in the stations that subscribed to them," adds Will Friedwald In his essay from the booklet of The Complete Peggy Lee & June Christy Capitol Transcription Sessions. "Rather than trying to compete with live broadcasts of the latest hit songs of the day," he continues, "the transcribers began to concentrate on what was, at that time, beginning to emerge as the standard songbook." Indeed, Peggy Lee's repertoire (not only for Capitol but also for MacGregor and World transcriptions) is heavily oriented toward standards.

But, as suggested by the presence of various country acts in the above-listed Capitol artist roster, standards were not the only order of the day. Capitol's Transcription Service actually divided its discs into various genres or series, each distinguished by a prefix letter.

The letter A was used for discs in the Popular Section, which produced a total of nearly 120 discs. Instrumentals comprise about 85% of the discs in this series, the exceptions being a few vocal batches by Hal Derwin, Peggy Lee, The King Cole Trio, The King Sisters and The Starlighters. Popular Section discs featured different artists on each side until about #A-74; thereafter either the same artists or different ones could be found, in a seemingly arbitrary fashion.

All other transcription discs by Peggy Lee belong to the B series, known as the Standard Section, in which the same artist was featured on both sides of the disc (aside from three or four exceptions). As suggested by the series' name, most of its repertoire consisted of standards. The last disc in this prolific series was #B-572. (Many of the last B discs, with numbers above 500, seem to be reissues of earlier discs, some of there originally in the A series.)

As already explained earlier in this page, Lee can also be found in the X series (Themes/Voice Tracks Section), which was dedicated to signature tunes, special patter and spoken announcements.

Lee is not featured in any of the other Capitol transcription series, which were: C (Concert Section), D (Latin American Section), E (International Section), G (Western/Hillbilly Section), J (Brass Band Section), K (Religious Section), N (Novelty Section), and W (Salon Section).

Capitol's Transcription Service appears to have stopped its recording operations in 1953. According to the aforementioned Ken Nelson, head of the service, "Capitol killed its transcription business by giving away free records to radio stations. When I was in radio we bought out records from the other companies. It was unheard of to get free records." (In their book Stan Kenton: The Studio Sessions, Michael Sparke and Peter Venudor write that the service would "close down altogether" soon after Kenton's last transcription session, on April 1, 1947, but the Capitol Label Discography shows otherwise. Perhaps the temporary cessation of recording activity, caused by the 1948 recording ban, led to confusion.)

The last dates listed in the logs are a couple of country sessions featuring Spade Cooley, on August the 10th. From its inception in 1945 to its closure in 1953, only a handful of female acts recorded for the label; namely: The King Sisters, The Dinning Sisters, Norma Larsen (for the Concert Section series), Yvonne King (for one 1947 session credited credited to the Four Of A Kind, not to her), June Christy (with The Kentones) and, of course Peggy Lee (with the Four Of a Kind and with Frank DeVol And His Orchestra).

In further commentary, Ken Nelson contends that Capitol's promotional strategies killed the entire radio transcription business. As quoted by Michael Jarrett in his book Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings: "Oh, and Capitol put transcriptions out of business. They started to give away promotion records, started to send them to record stations. Lee [Gillette] had recorded a song on transcription called 'Twelfth Street Rag' with Pee Wee Hunt. The demand for it as a record was tremendous. There weren't any records [only transcriptions were available]. So they [Capitol] decided to put out a record and given them away [to radio stations for promotional purposes]. Before that, the radio stations had to buy their records. I know because I was buying them. All the other [transcription] companies said, Hey what's going on here? So record labels started to give out promotion records. The radio stations said, What the hell? We're getting these records for free, Why should we pay for transcriptions? Every transcription company went out of business. Capitol Transcriptions shut down, and I took over the country department." As an actual inside witness to the events under discussion, Nelson's claims have undeniable validity, and are quite intriguing. Yet, when placed within the overall history of the radio transcription business, Nelson's commentary might also be justifiably suspected of being overstated.

The Peggy Lee Shows

When it came to playing the discs that Capitol's transcription service sent on a weekly basis, subscribing radio stations could rely on suggestions to be found in a monthly Capitol newsletter, sent along with each fresh batch of discs.

Subscribers were free to pick among various other options as well. One Capitol-endorsed option involved the station's own creation of a show centered on a particular artist or a particular topic/mood.  The station could assemble a 15-minute show by combining the performances in one Capitol transcription disc with so-called aids, such as the ones that were itemized earlier in this page (i.e., the spoken tracks and music themes from Capitol's series of X discs).   Thus a given radio station could put together its own Peggy Lee Show, for instance, by using her many discs from the B series as primary material, and the X discs as supplements. 

In addition to being able to put together a show "hosted" by a single artist, stations could resort to the alternative of treating an artist's numbers as guest performances, to be heard in a show billed to another artist.  The Lee performances most likely to have received this treatment are the ones on the A series, for which she was backed by Frank DeVol and His Orchestra.  Performances from that series probably lent themselves to the "guest" approach because they featured different artists on each side. (Of Lee's two sole discs in the A series, one features Jan Garber And His Orchestra on the other side, the other  Skitch Henderson And His Orchestra.)  Besides, this A series appears to have favored orchestras and other instrumentally-oriented ensembles.  Hence, through their incorporation in a bandleader's show, A performances by a singer such as Peggy Lee could be easily turned into guest spots, or even canary spots.  Some stations must have doubtlessly inserted her vocals in programs that were credited to DeVol, Henderson, or Garber.  In fact, one of the two above-seen ads offers evidence for this approach to Lee's transcriptions. 

Incidentally, both of these ads offer indications that audiences were favoring Peggy Lee's body of work for Capitol's transcription service.  The first ad gives her visual as well as textual prominence: her name is listed first and a photo of her face is place above all others.  Then there is the second ad, which touts the success that a so-called Jan Garber Show - Featuring Peggy Lee had had at a subscribing station (WBIR).  We are told that WBIR's staff had "built the show using Capitol's programming aids" and that, after three months of airplay, the daily program had successfully grabbed sponsors for each day of its week.  

One additional manner of programming transcriptions would have involved the simple creation of a show dedicated to the playing of transcription selections by multiple artists rather than just one. This strategy is probably behind a radio program called Your Show Of Stars, first broadcast by Los Angeles' KFI on Sunday evenings in the summer of 1946. The program was said to feature numbers from Frank DeVol's Orchestra, Peggy Lee, Hal Derwin, and The King Sisters. Since all of them were artists who had recorded Capitol transcriptions, and since the program's host was also the program director of the transcription service (Don Otis), chances are that the performances heard during Your Show Of Stars were actually Capitol transcription recordings.

Commercial Issues Of Peggy Lee's Capitol Transcriptions

Transcriptions were originally intended for radio airplay only, not for sale to the public. Nevertheless, exceptions to this "not-for-sale" norm could easily be made by an enterprise such as Capitol, since it owned both the transcription service and the retail label. In the late 1940s, Capitol indeed released a few of its transcription performances not only on 16" radio disc but also on commercial 78-rpm disc. One of Peggy Lee's 72 Capitol transcriptions, "A Nightingale Can Sing The Blues," may be an example of this practice.

Leaving aside the special case of "A Nightingale Can Sing The Blues," the first commercial appearance of Peggy Lee's Capitol transcriptions had to wait about half a century. In 1990, the mail-order label Starline issued nine of them in a cassette titled Them There Eyes. Capitol is not presumed to have had any involvement in the release of this cassette.

Eight years later, Lee's remaining 63 transcriptions made their commercial debut thanks to Mosaic Records, a jazz-oriented label celebrated for its massive boxes of rare and pristinely mastered material. Mosaic made an arrangement with EMI Capitol to retrieve, clean, master and issue the complete Capitol transcriptions of both Peggy Lee and June Christy. The resulting boxed set was Mosaic's first all-vocals release.

Merely two or three years after the appearance of the Mosaic set, the label Jazz Factory (of the Disconforme family of labels) took advantage of lax copyright rules in Europe, shamelessly appropriating and reissuing nearly the entire contents of Mosaic's boxed set. No permission and no payment was deemed necessary. Obviously wary of legal repercussions, Jazz Factory only abstained from including numbers that Mosaic had listed as "previously unissued" (i.e., never issued in any format -- not even on radio transcription disc). Mercifully, the band tracks with Frank DeVol and his orchestra were also left out.

For completists, Mosaic's The Complete Peggy Lee & June Christy Capitol Transcription Sessions remains the definitive issue of the work that Lee did for Capitol's radio service.

For listeners in search of a sampler, the Capitol Jazz CD Trav'lin' Light is a fine option. It contains 15 of the 72 selections. An alternative CD issue was released by the public domain label Jasmine: A Musical Marriage offers 22 of the 72 selections.

Statistics: Total Number Of Masters; Performances Not On CD

This discographical page lists 72 transcription masters, distributed over twelve transcription discs, and 2 additional masters found in a thirteenth, special transcription disc. (Therefore, this page covers a total of 74 masters.) Although Capitol transcription discs were created exclusively for radio airplay, nearly all the masters found in them have been commercially released -- most notably, on CD. The only exceptions are the two performances in the thirteenth disc., both consisting of a composition titled "I'm In The Mood For Love," co-written by the singer with her husband Dave Barbour. (The two performances might actually be one and the same, but they are treated as two in the transcription disc in which they appear. I remain uncertain as to the specifics because I have not listened to that disc.) "I'm In The Mood For Love" was actually Lee's theme: some radio stations must have played it as an opening and closing of a Lee-only show, with some of her other 72 masters played in-between.

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Sessions Reported: 11

Performances Reported: 74

Unique Songs Reported: 73

Unique Issues Reported: 89

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