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Black Coffee---Peggy Lee


BruceH

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  • 4 months later...

Black Coffee was my first-ever Lee purchase, and after amassing something of a Lee collection, I'd have to say it's still my favorite. I've got it on a Jasmine LP.

Those Lee two-fer CDs are nice. I'd like to find more of them.

Edited by Kalo
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  • 1 month later...

That sounds like a must-have.  What's on the cover?

Small picture, but this is the one I have ...

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Things Are Swingin' - Jump for Joy

And this is the one I have:

B000005RRT.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

THE MAN I LOVE coupled with IF YOU GO.

Now I got 'em both! (Got the second one at Stereo Jack's a week or so back). Interesting that the better disc leads in each case.

Listening to The Man I Love/If You Go right now. :tup

I agree with Sangrey that her "happiness is a Thing Called Joe," is fine. But you haven't heard that tune if you haven't heard Ethel Waters's original rendition on the soundtrack to Cabin in the Sky. Wow!

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  • 1 year later...

Must say I prefer "If you go" to "The man I love" - probably because she sings a lot of songs you don't often hear. Everything on "The man I love" is your usual run through the Great American Songbook.

I think that's why I prefer Chris Connor to Peggy Lee - even more unusual material.

Frankly, the producers, arrangers and singers take so much care over releases like these, there's usually not much to choose between them except the songs themselves.

(Mind you, Chris could never sing "Always true to you darling in my fashion" the way Peggy does.)

MG

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I like Chris Connor, but I have never yet felt moved by her the way I have by Peggy. Maybe it's just personal preferrences, but it's not just the material for me.

Listened to some of the Benny Goodman material this morning. Young Peggy, not fully formed. Still quite fine stuff.

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Am in the midst of the new P. Lee biography, "Fever." It's good (better than I thought it would be -- convincingly detailed and not a so-called "pathography" in tone), but the facts of Lee's wounded/needy emotional life are terribly sad at times. A few nights ago the book (which I'd been reading it just before I went to sleep) inspired one of the most ghastly nightmares I've ever experienced.

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I like Chris Connor, but I have never yet felt moved by her the way I have by Peggy. Maybe it's just personal preferrences, but it's not just the material for me.

Listened to some of the Benny Goodman material this morning. Young Peggy, not fully formed. Still quite fine stuff.

Certainly personal preference!

I'd certainly been aware of Peggy Lee before "Fever", but I knew her name then. And I bought "Beauty & the beat" as soon as it came out and played it to death (now on copy #3). It wasn't until 1961 I heard of Chris Connor - a US serviceman who was a neighbour played me "Chris craft" and I was immediately overwhelmed - the sound of her voice, the strange instruments, and most of all, beautiful songs no one ever heard of - well, I hadn't - and a couple had never been recorded before (and weren't again for nearly 40 years). And how many singers have attempted Ornette's "Lonely woman"? Only a handful, all relatively recently. Chris did it in 1962! Phew! (Of course, she and Ornette had the same manager.)

I've had a thing for her ever since. In the late '60s I got rid of all of my Chris Connor albums - I had 15 by then - because I thought I could get along without them (and because I was on the dole). But I was wrong. Thank goodness for the CD reissues!

MG

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I just got the SINGLES box through a BMG sale a couple of weeks ago & feel confident saying (even though I'm only halfway through it) that any P. Lee fan would not regret picking it up. Eager to read that new bio as well. I wish DREAM STREET would be reissued, even though much of it is included on the 2-CD BLACK COFFEE Decca anthology. The 1999 twofer that paired it with MISS WONDERFUL is OOP.

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A few nights ago the book (which I'd been reading it just before I went to sleep) inspired one of the most ghastly nightmares I've ever experienced.

Care to share?

No, Jim -- in part because it wouldn't make much sense without my doing a whole lot more good writing than I could come up with. It wasn't really a booga-booga bad events nightmare as a passle of very bad feelings that I''d never experienced before in real life but now was experiencing full bore one.

Randy Twizzle -- Where the heck did you come up with that Eddie Fisher review?

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"Randy Twizzle -- Where the heck did you come up with that Eddie Fisher review?"

I found it at the same place I get most of the stuff I bore people here with, newspaperarchive.com. A simple "Larry Kart" search brings up number of syndicated entertainment articles and reviews, mostly from the 70s and 80s and largely from papers in Elyria and Lima Ohio and Syracuse NY, though there is a rave Johnny Mathis review from 1977 that appeared in a Pasadena newspaper. The Fisher review came from the Lima News on Nov. 30, 1977.

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