irresponsible, reckless, adolescent shenanigans of rock ‘n’ roll artists

epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer 

By 1958, her persona as a smoky, smoldering jazz dame had hardened into cliché. The Lee arrangement of “Fever” is stripped down to just upright bass and drums, but it also involves a husky, heavy breathing vocal, massively overdubbed finger snaps and newly written (by Lee), cutesy lyrics about Captain Smith and Pocahontas. Was she “hipping it up with Beatspeak,” or laying it on a little thick, like a “square” actor gluing on a goatee to play a beatnik on television?

“Peggy Lee couldn’t sing like Little Willie John. Everybody in the (Hotel) Theresa and all over Harlem were talking about how those white producers who came uptown sneaking around the Apollo Theater recording black material and then you’d hear a white singer on the radio singing the same song. That would put anyone on junk.” Faye Pridgon says she laughed when she heard Lee’s version, and she claims Willie did too. “That song had gotten a hell of a play in the ’hood long before that girl came along. When Pat Boone or whoever covered a song, it was a joke to us.”