This Day in Pop Music History (Peggy Lee Gives the U.S. “Fever”)

July 21, 1958—With a bass-and-drum riff, snapping fingers, and a come-hither voice insinuating knowledge of all things erotic, Peggy Lee’s cover version of “Fever” entered the Top 40 pop charts, where it peaked at $8.

The Forties and Fifties represented the golden age of the so-called “girl singer,” featuring, among other songstresses, Dinah Shore, Doris Day, Helen O’Connell, Teresa Brewer, Jo Stafford, Julie London, and Rosemary Clooney (who even titled an autobiography written in her seventies, with characteristic lack of pretension, Girl Singer). While possessing the scrubbed Nordic looks that would normally make her a full-fledged member of this musical sorority, Peggy Lee was different.

First, there was her carefully cultivated aura as the pop-jazz siren of suggestiveness. Like Norah Jones, Lee preferred caressing a lyric to belting it out, but with none of the current pop star’s shyness. Incendiary Blonde was the title of a 1945 Betty Hutton musical biopic about Prohibition Era nightclub owner Texas Guinan, but it might just as easily have described Lee and her effect on men in her prime from the Forties through the Sixties.

For an idea of this impact, take a look at the fine tribute written immediately after her death by Terry Teachout, the superb Wall Street Journal cultural critic, whose blog did much to inspire the one you’re reading now. The spark that set off the young Teachout was his discovery, in 1968, at the height of the rock ‘n’ roll era, of “Fever” in his father’s record collection:

If a Hitchcock blonde could have raised her voice in song, then Peggy Lee, who died last Monday at the age of eighty-one, would have sounded pretty much like that, cool and self-possessed and…amused. But even at twelve, I got the message, and then some: what the lady on the record had in mind was pretty much what I had in mind twenty-four hours a day, except that her point of view was more informed. That was when I realized my father knew a thing or two about music.

Written by John Davenport, pseudonym of the prolific Otis Blackwell, and Eddie Cooley, “Fever” ascended the R&B charts in 1956 on the strength of its smoldering interpretation by Little Willie John. Two years later, in May 1958, Lee entered the studio and cut a cover version with her own distinctive contribution: new lyrics about Romeo and Juliet, Captain Smith and Pocahontas. (Studio musician

Howard Roberts probably became better known for his dexterous finger-snapping on this record than for the guitar work that was his bread and butter through the years.)

In the years since Lee’s recording, the song has been covered even more, including by Eva Cassidy, The Jacksons, Tom Jones, and, in a truly nightmarish Eurotrashing of the tune, Madonna.

The best I’ve heard of these was Elvis Presley’s, which followed Lee’s lead in its restraint. It was one of the songs he tackled on May 3, 1960, in his return to the recording studio following the end of his Army stint. Released as a single, this version was later included on the massive compilation, From Nashville to Memphis: The Essential 60s Masters. Paul Simpson’s The Rough Guide to Elvis indicated that The King, like Lee, added his own lyrics in the 1970s: “Myrna Smith and J.D. Sumner had a very mad affair/when their wives and husbands caught them/saw nothing but teeth and hair.” (Sumner was one of Elvis’ backup vocalists.)

Still, it’s Lee—or, as she insisted on being called when being introduced, Miss Peggy Lee—who truly made her mark on the song. It’s a barn-burner that survives almost any environment or context you can imagine. (I experienced this firsthand when I saw Paula Vogel’s shrill 1999 suburban satire, The Mineola Twins, performed by the Roundabout Theatre Co. ; Lee’s “Fever” might have been the single grace note of that misbegotten afternoon show.)

Aside from her sensual image, Lee made her mark as a lyricist—the only major female singer of her time to do so—with such compositions as "Manana," "I Don’t Know Enough About You," and the entire score of the animated feature Lady and the Tramp.

At the end of a long life of horrible tumult—a stepmother whose abuse inspired the Lee song, “One Beating a Day, Maybe More," four rocky marriages, epic lawsuits against the Hilton Hotel chain, Johnson’s Wax and Disney—obesity-induced diabetes left Lee in need of an oxygen tank and a wheelchair when she came out to perform. I’ve heard it claimed, though, that when the spotlight caught her snapping her fingers to the familiar bass-and-drum opening, men of a certain age were still known to break out into a sweat.