14
QUEEN OF ARTS: TISH ONEY
Channeling Peggy Lee ACCLAIMED CNY MUSICIAN TISH ONEY PENS TRIBUTE TO HER CHILDHOOD INSPIRATION By Jason Klaiber
T
ish Oney had already sung for years in school and church choirs, but it wasn’t until her mother urged her to take sight of a televised Peggy Lee performance in the mid-1980s that a dream emerged. Oney, who was about 13 at the time, recalled the edited, PBS-broadcasted concert being the first instance she had witnessed of a woman fronting a jazz orchestra while calling the tunes, introducing the band and addressing the audience. “It was just kind of a new experience for me to see that happening,” Oney said. “Peggy Lee provided one of my first pivotal memories of a strong, capable woman. She was captivating.” Now, after approximately a decade and a half of researching and writing, Oney has released a book tracing Lee’s musical catalog and development as a singer.
In its 233 pages, Peggy Lee: A Century of Song takes a magnifying glass to the titular vocalist’s recording processes at Capitol Records in addition to her live performances, posthumous material and contributions to the film industry. It also includes interviews with Lee’s family members, friends and colleagues. “I wanted to write a nontraditional nonfiction book that wasn’t really meant to be a biography,” Oney said. “It’s really much more about her music than it is about her as a person.”
October 2020
As part of the “Peggy Lee 100” global campaign, the book’s release coincides with the centennial of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient’s year of birth. This past May, the month that would have marked Lee’s hundredth birthday, Oney contributed to a panel discussion over Zoom alongside singers Billie Eilish, k.d. lang and the Black Pumas’ Eric Burton as well as Lee’s granddaughter Holly Foster Wells for the Grammy Museum’s At Home Series. The Zoom chat found the guests discussing Lee’s influence, command of the stage and sense of groove and swing. According to Oney, Lee set herself apart not only by penning a slew of hits but also by co-writing her own autobiographical Broadway show, spending time as a radio host, supplying the musical theme to the Western drama Johnny Guitar and lending her voice to characters in the Disney film Lady and the Tramp. The author also said that Lee adapted to the changing times during her career, making sure to incorporate burgeoning musical genres, recruit younger musicians to fill out her band as time went on and embrace the work of contemporary composers of the 1970s and later. “She was a chameleon,” Oney said. “She wasn’t one
who would continue to sing in the same style her entire life.” In terms of the vocal stylings that became her signature, Lee was known as a “master of subtlety,” Oney said. A passage in the recently unveiled book mentions an early gig of Lee’s at The Doll House in Palm Springs, California, where she managed to quiet down a talkative crowd by singing at a lower and lower volume until they started to lean in and listen. “She learned right then that she had the power to pull people in, but it wasn’t by belting louder,” Oney said. “It was by getting softer and more intimate with the audience.” Amidst her research, Oney discovered Lee would fill up notebooks with lists of accessories she needed to pack for tours, a record of the gowns she wore in various cities and specificities like hand gestures to employ onstage. Lee also planned out which songs would sound best together in the form of medleys, used often to decrease the amount of downtime and applause breaks in her shows. John Chiodini, who wrote the book’s foreword, worked as Peggy Lee’s guitarist and musical director throughout the 1980s. He recorded four albums with the departed songstress, the same number Oney recorded with his trio’s help, all of them considered for Grammy Awards. Oney’s 2019 album The Best Part contains three songs cowritten by Lee and Chiodini that were previously unheard: “Most of All I Love You,” “I’ve Got a Brand New Baby” and “I’ve Been Too Lonely for Survivor Edition
