BBC Presents 'Queens Of Jazz: The Joy And Pain Of The Jazz Divas'

Peggy Lee – Music was her Life’s Breath

Peggy Lee was one of the queens of American Jazz during her lifetime from 1920 to her death in 2002. She was an accomplished singer, songwriter, composer and actress. To borrow a phrase from the bakeries of Sara Lee, “no one doesn’t like Peggy Lee!” This phrase is especially suitable for all of us over the age of 50.

The younger generation may not remember her from actuality, but with the coming of the World Wide Web and the internet, YouTube videos are available to all, of some of Peggy’s most memorable songs:

Fever
It’s a good day
Is that all there is?
He’s a Tramp
What more can a woman do?
Manana

As a songwriter and the voice of several characters in the Walt Disney film, “Lady and the Tramp,” many people have heard Peggy speak and sing possibly without realizing it. She was a very accomplished lady. One of the songs she wrote, “What more can a woman do?” was recorded by Sarah Vaughn, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Her recording of “Manana” was number one on the billboard charts for over nine weeks in 1948.

As an actress, her most memorable films were Lady and the Tramp and Pete Kelly’s Blues in 1955 and The Jazz Singer in 1957. She was nominated for best supporting actress for Pete Kelly’s Blues. Her career spanned over 60 years and even though she was suffering from complications of diabetes in her final years, she sometimes performed in a wheelchair.

Peggy was married four times; to Dave Barbour, a guitarist and composer with whom she had her only child, daughter Nicki Lee Foster, actors Brad Dexter and Dewey Martin and bandleader and musician Jack Del Rio. She herself had been the seventh child in a family of eight.

As one of the greats that emerged from the Jazz era, it was a great oversight on the part of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to omit Peggy Lee’s name at the 2002 Academy Awards memorial presentation. Besides her Academy Award nomination, she had 12 Grammy nominations, with one win for “Is that all there is?” and also received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Her epitaph on her gravestone marker states: “Music is my life’s breath.”

The BBC will broadcast a new documentary titled Queens of Jazz: The Joy and Pain of the Jazz Divas, which charts the stories of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone and Annie Ross.

The doc will air at 9pm on Friday, May 10, on BBC 4.