I think that's not too bad a rule, but you can't help falling in love with somebody. Benny and I made up, although David didn't play with him anymore. But I fell in love with David the first time I heard him play, and so I married him. Lee said:ĭavid joined Benny's band and there was a ruling that no one should fraternize with the girl singer. In March 1943, Lee married Dave Barbour, a guitarist in Goodman's band. She sang with Goodman's orchestra in two 1943 films, Stage Door Canteen and The Powers Girl. In 1942, Lee had her first number-one hit, "Somebody Else Is Taking My Place", followed in 1943 by " Why Don't You Do Right?", which sold more than one million copies and made her famous. Lee stayed with the Benny Goodman Orchestra for two years. She joined his band in August 1941 and made her first recording, singing "Elmer's Tune". I thought that he didn't like me at first, but it just was that he was preoccupied with what he was hearing. He was looking at me strangely, I thought, but it was just his preoccupied way of looking. So the next evening, she brought Benny in, because they were looking for a replacement for Helen Forrest. According to Lee:īenny's then-fiancée, Lady Alice Duckworth, came into the Buttery, and she was very impressed. There, she was noticed by bandleader Benny Goodman. He offered her a gig at the Buttery Room, a nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel West. While performing at The Doll House, Lee met Frank Bering, the owner of the Ambassador East and West in Chicago. I had learned how to reach and hold my audience-softly, with feeling." The noise dropped to a hum the hum gave way to silence. As I sang, I kept thinking, 'softly with feeling'. When they discovered they couldn't hear me, they began to look at me. The more noise they made, the more softly I sang. I knew I couldn't sing over them, so I decided to sing under them. Here, she developed her trademark sultry purr, having decided to compete with the noisy crowd with subtlety rather than volume. When Lee returned to California in 1940, she took a job singing at The Doll House in Palm Springs. The following year, remaining in North Dakota, she was hired to perform regularly at The Powers Hotel in Fargo, and toured with both the Sev Olson and the Will Osborne Orchestras. Lee returned to North Dakota for the operation.
After she was taken to the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center she was told she needed a tonsillectomy. Her employment was cut short when she fainted onstage due to overwork and an inadequate diet. Later in 1938, Lee returned to Hollywood to audition for the MC at The Jade. She wrote about this experience in the song, "The Nickel Ride", which she composed with Dave Grusin for the 1974 film of the same name. When the job ended after Easter, she was hired to work as a carnival barker at the Balboa Fun Zone. Her first job was seasonal work on Balboa Island, Newport Beach as a short order cook and waitress at Harry's Cafe. Lee left home and traveled to Hollywood, California, at the age of 17 in March 1938. In October 1937, radio personality Ken Kennedy, of WDAY in Fargo, (the most widely heard station in North Dakota), auditioned Egstrom and put her on the air that day, but not before he changed her name to Peggy Lee.
Both during and after her high-school years, Lee sang for small sums on local radio stations. She later had her own 15-minute Saturday radio show sponsored by a local restaurant that paid her salary in food. Lee first sang professionally over KOVC radio in Valley City, North Dakota, in 1936. She traveled to various locations with Haines' quintet on Fridays after school and on weekends. In Wimbledon, Lee was the female singer for a six-piece college dance band with leader Lyle "Doc" Haines. The upper floor of the museum, where the Egstrom family once lived, features exhibits that trace Lee's career and her regional and state connection. The Wimbledon depot building, where she and her family lived and worked, became the Midland Continental Depot Transportation Museum, featuring The Peggy Lee Exhibit, in 2012. She graduated from Wimbledon High School in 1937. Lee and her family lived in several towns along the Midland Continental Railroad (Jamestown, Nortonville and Wimbledon). After her mother died when Lee was four, her father married Minnie Schaumberg Wiese. Her father was Swedish-American and her mother was Norwegian-American. Lee was born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, United States, on May 26, 1920, the seventh of the eight children of Selma Emele (née Anderson) Egstrom and Marvin Olaf Egstrom, a station agent for the Midland Continental Railroad.