With her sultry voice and precise stagecraft, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, known for hits like “Is That All There Is” and “Fever,” exerted an alluring command over her audience as a writer-vocalist of jazz, pop and torch songs.
“Sunday Morning” originally broadcast this story on February 6, 2022. In 1970 Peggy Lee won a Grammy for “Is That All There Is”, a song that many heard as an anthem of ennui… Is that all there is? Is that all there is? If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is. but not Lee, says her granddaughter, Holly Foster-Wells: “She saw it as absolutely life-affirming and hopeful, that bad things are gonna happen and that you can rise above them. Stand up and have a ball. Celebrate life, in spite of all of this that’s happening.”
And Lee had a lot to celebrate. At 50 she was already a legend, an artist of astonishing versatility – a master of cool (with “Black Coffee”), a heartbreaker (“Then Was Then (And Now Is Now) “) , and a trailblazer [“I’m a Woman”]. Correspondent Mo Rocca asked Lee biographer Peter Richmond, “Musically, how many different Peggy Lees were there?”
“Oh God, dozens!” he laughed. “There’s Latin. There’s blues. There’s jazz. There’s pop. ‘Oh, you want me to do “The Folks Who Live On The Hill” so you’ll weep? I can do that.’ ‘You want me to do “Black Coffee’ so you think it’s like, Oh, I’m hanging out with junkies at a kitchen table? I can do that.'”
And all of those Peggy Lees can be traced back to the desolate plains of North Dakota, and the girl then named Norma Deloris Egstrom. There, in the tiny town of Wimbledon, in what’s now the Peggy Lee museum, Norma spent her high school years. Rocca said, “That wind, it’s like a rumbling.”
“It’s powerful; it feels like it could blow this house down”, said Foster-Wells. Her mother had died when she was just four. Her father, the town’s railroad depot manager, was an alcoholic. Foster-Wells said, “He really at times couldn’t run the depot, so she would have to take over for him.”
Worse still, her father remarried a woman who was physically abusive. Lee later wrote that her stepmother once beat her over the head with a cast-iron skillet.
“My grandmother, she said she would look out at the railroad tracks and just imagine where they led”, said Foster-Wells.
