“Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.”
- Criss Jami
1) I love the classic 50s-60s era of great jazz and popular song.
2) I love a great female voice/singer.
3) I love a well-crafted song, delivered in a fine arrangement.
4) Good sound enhances my enjoyment of music.
5) I'm not sure I am familiar enough with Peggy Lee.
If you can answer yes to a few of those (I'm good for all five), you need to hear this record. Available on CD or a very nicely pressed 2 LP set, the mastering job is excellent and the sound is impressive. The song selection is also good, with a few that don't usually make it to most of her "best of" sets. Of course there are many compilations by Lee out there, and her Decca and Capitol work are usually mutually exclusive, so it is also nice that this one contains three essentials from her mid-fifties Decca stint along with her Capitol work.
And then there's Peggy Lee's voice and sensual delivery. She is unique in her delivery. Sexy, but never coquettish, Lee whispers in your ear like a woman that knows.
Great songs (five that she wrote), great singer, great sound.
I
grew up in north Alabama back in the 1970s when dinosaurs still roamed
the earth. I'm speaking, of course, of the three great Alabama icons:
George Wallace, Bear Bryant, and Ronnie Van Zant. Now, Ronnie Van Zant
wasn't from Alabama, he was from Florida, he was a huge Neil Young fan
but in the tradition of Merle Haggard writing Okie From Muskogee to tell
his dad's point of view on the hippies in Vietnam, Ronnie felt that the
other side of the story should be told. Neil Young always claimed that
Sweet Home Alabama was one of his favorite songs and legend has it that
he was an honorary pallbearer at Ronnie's funeral, such is the duality
of the southern thing ...and Bear Bryant
wore a cool lookin' red checkered hat and won football games, and
there's few things more loved in Alabama than football and the men who
know how to win at it. So when the Bear would come to town, there would
be a parade. Me, I was one of them pussy boys cuz i hated football, so i
got a guitar but a guitar was a poor substitute for a football with the
girls in my high school. So my band hit the road, and we didn't play no
Skynyrd, neither. I came of age rebelling against the music in my high
school parking lot. It wasn't until years later after leaving the South
for a while that I came to appreciate and understand the whole Skynyrd
thing and its misunderstood glory. I left the south and learned how
different people's perceptions of the Southern Thing was from what I had
seen in my life, which leads us to George Wallace... ...now
Wallace was, for all practical purposes, the governor of Alabama from
1962 until 1986. Once when a law prevented him from succeeding himself,
he ran his wife Lurleen in his place and she won by a landslide. He's
most famous as the belligerent racist voice of the segregationist South,
standing in the doorways of schools and waging a war against the federal
government that he decried as Hypocritical.
Now Wallace started out as a lawyer and a judge with a very progressive
and humanitarian track record for a man of his time, but he lost his
first bid for governor in 1958 by
hedging on the race issue against a man who spoke out against integration. Wallace ran again in '62 as a staunch segregationist and
won big and for the next decade he spoke out loudly. He accused Kennedy
and King of being communist and he was constantly on national news
representing "the good people" of Alabama ...and
ya know race was only an issue on tv in the house that i grew up in.
Wallace was viewed as a man from another time and place, but when i
first ventured out of the south I was shocked at how strongly Wallace
was associated with Alabama and its people. Racism is a worldwide
problem, and it's been like that since the beginning of recorded history
and it ain't just white and black, but thanks to George Wallace, it's
always a little more convenient to play it with a Southern accent ...and Bands
like Lynyrd Skynyrd attempted to show another side of the south, one
that certainly exists, but few saw beyond the rebel flag and this
applies not only to their critics and detractors but also their fans and
followers. So for a while, when Neil Young would come to town, he'd get
death threats down in Alabama. Ironically, in 1971, after a
particularly racially charged campaign, Wallace began backpedaling and
he opened up Alabama politics to minorities at a rate faster than most
northern states or the federal government. Wallace spent the rest of his
life trying to explain away his racist past and in 1982 he won his last
term in office with over 90% of the black vote, such is the duality of
the southern thing ...and George Wallace
died back in '98 and he's in hell now, not because he's a racist. His
track record as a judge and his late life quest for redemption make a
good argument for his being, at worst, no worse than most white men of
his generation, North or South. Because of his blind ambition and
his hunger for votes, he turned a blind eye to the suffering of black
America and he became a pawn in the fight against Civil Rights cause ...fortunately for him, the devil is also a southerner
