Peggy Lee in reference book

Has anyone else read Will Friedwald's bio and critiques of Lee's work in his "Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers", recently published?

Yes, we have. (Or at least I have)... To anyone curious yet still unable to read the book: you can access much of it through books.google.com . The essay about Peggy Lee starts on page 287.

Iv: Did you think it was a fair analysis of her work, especially those LP's it named as her most important?

Well, I thought that it was a solid essay. I was particularly pleased with his opening point (which arguably was his main point, as well): he calls Peggy Lee the only female singer who "can be said to truly belong" to the two "essential camps of great American female singers." He says that Peggy qualifies as both "one of the all-time pop superstars" and "genuine jazz royalty." Within the world of classic pop and jazz singing, he is thus placing her in an important, key position. I'll take it.

(Granted: I would have preferred that he had stayed away from calling her the "only" one, because obviously some readers will disagree. My preference would have been to treat Peggy as the female singer who best assimilated the techniques of the two "camps" -- or something along those lines. But anyway: high praise indeed.)

I was also pleased with the other points that he emphasized: versatility, flawless timing, rhythmic flexibility, proven songwriting ability, variety in her choice of music styles and repertoire, remarkable command of her recording career, etc.

It is true that some of the songs and albums that he picked for discussion come off as odd choices. For instance, he writes at some length about the virtues of Peggy's version of "You Stepped Out of a Dream," from the album Olé Ala Lee. And yet neither this rendition nor the album from which it comes are among her best known pieces. But

a) he's previously written so much about Peggy that I appreciate reading his take on something fresh. (Nothing worse than lazy writers who recycle the same points article after article, using even the same examples.)

b) the quality of Peggy's overall work is only reinforced by the fact that a relatively obscure performance can generate so much praise from someone who is deemed an expert in the field

Bones to pick? Few, and not significant. Fan that I am, I would have liked to see more pages dedicated to Peggy. It's not that this is a short essay, mind you; it's 8 pages of small typing. But there are various other singers to whom many more pages were dedicated. (Why does this matter? In a book like this one, quantity tends to be an indicator of rank.) Furthermore, I would have liked him to include a few additional, worthwhile points about Peggy, found in his previous writings.

Incidentally, he has a strong dislike for Peggy's (and, presumably, anybody else's) version of "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky." If memory serves, this essay was the third or fourth time that he expressed it in writing. Similarly, he's never been a fan of the album Mirrors (deemed by others one of Peggy's best), and he makes his dislike known in this essay, once again. His dislike seems to have become more tempered, less virulent, however.

In the interest of full and fair disclosure, I should add that I read a portion of Friedwald's essays (Peggy's, of course, and also well over a dozen others) when the prospective book was still a manuscript. (Naturally, I made some comments and suggestions here and there, but in the case of Peggy's essay, the latter were all minor.)

Ivan