1 The Early Years: 1900-1953

All revolutions begin with a single provocateur, a strong-willed individual, a fearless leader, whose foresight and courage give expression and energy to others. For the women’s revolution in music, that individual was Lil Hardin Armstrong.

Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Lil Hardin was subjected to a dizzying array of contradictions. At the time of her birth in 1898, slavery had only been abolished in the South for 33 years. Her grandmother, who lived in the household with her, had been a slave on a Mississippi plantation, and dinner-table conversation often centered on the evils of human bondage. For Lil, slavery was not an abstract historical concept, or some distant blemish on the national psyche; it was the cold, hard reality of her grandmother’s life.

Such dire representations of man’s inhumanity to man could easily have dampened Lil’s spirit, but that was not the case. Lil’s soul burned with the promise of freedom; a promise that was expressed with music. From a very early age, she showed an interest in the organ that graced the living room of the boarding house where her family lived.

Lil showed such promise on the keyboard that her mother, Dempsey, who worked in domestic service for a white family, took on extra work so that she could pay for Lil’s after-school music lessons. Dempsey didn’t envision her sacrifice paying off in financial terms. She was preparing Lil for stardom in that most sacrosanct of African-American institutions: The church. Dempsey wanted Lil to do the Lord’s work—hallelujah!—by playing the music that uplifted the congregation’s spirits and carried them on to glory.

Dempsey’s plan had only one weakness. As the business axiom dictates, success often is based on three principles: Location, location, location. Unfortunately for Dempsey’s dream, they lived only a couple of blocks off of Beale Street at a time when W.C. Handy was composing a new type of music there called the blues.

By 1910, when Lil was 12, Handy and his band regularly marched up and down the streets of Memphis, playing a mixture of Mississippi Delta folk music and European harmonics—Handy was a classically trained trumpet player—immortalized two years later with “Memphis Blues.” Beale Street rocked every night with the sounds of Handy’s blues, Delta folk music, and a second, new style of playing called jazz that had made its way upriver from New Orleans.

What Dempsey heard on Beale Street horrified her because she considered it the “devil’s music.” Those feelings had nothing to do with the way the music sounded. It had everything to do with the stories, true stories, she heard about the young girls that were lured to Beale Street by the bright lights and promises of pretty new clothes, only to discover that their only financial assets were their bodies. So many young women were flocking to Memphis at the turn of the last century that the city was forced to create a women’s protection agency to deal with the problems associated with their arrival.

The ironic thing about that was that because sex was such a valuable commodity on Beale Street, women were afforded a level of protection not seen in any other city in America. Beale Street gained a national reputation as the safest place in the country for female performers: Not only were women protected from the perils of the street, they were given equal status with male performers. Blues singer Alberta Hunter got her start there, though she later denied it. So did guitarist Memphis Minnie.

None of that mattered to Lil Hardin. She was much too young to understand the dangers that her gender attracted when the sun went down and the prostitutes, drug dealers, and con artists hit the street. All she knew was that the music she heard in her neighborhood set her soul on fire. How could such wonderful music be evil? Lil was smart enough not to advertise her interest in the music, and whenever Dempsey railed about the devil’s music, Lil simply nodded her approval and kept her thoughts to herself.

By the time Lil was nine, her skills on the organ were such that she landed a position as the organist for her Sunday school class at the Lebanon Baptist Church. Her favorite hymn was “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and she played it at every opportunity. Unfortunately for her career as a church organist, she added jazz and blues riffs to the song. This rebellion delighted her classmates, but ultimately attracted the wrath of her pastor, who agreed with Dempsey that blues and jazz were the devil’s music.

Lil had many disagreements with her mother over the music.

“It’s only music,” Lil argued.

“No,” Dempsey fumed. “It’s Satan’s handiwork!”

That generational tug-of-war went on between Lil and her mother for years. Finally, when Lil turned seventeen, Dempsey decided that she needed to do something desperate to save her daughter from the perils of Beale Street. Her solution was to send her to Fisk University in Nashville, an all-black school founded for the express purpose of educating the sons and daughters of former slaves. There, Dempsey felt, Lil would get a good Christian education and learn to become a lady.

Going off to college was a rarity for girls of any age at that time in Memphis, and it was nothing short of astonishing that Dempsey was able to raise enough money to send her only child to a private school. There were only three other students from Memphis in Lil’s class, and two of them were males. Lil took as many music courses as she could at Fisk, expanding her horizons, but she never lost interest in blues and jazz.

In 1917, when she returned to Memphis after her first year at Fisk, she purchased the sheet music to Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” a song that was popular with young people all across America. Dempsey found the sheet music. It was the final straw. She gave Lil a sound beating with a broomstick, packed up all their belongings, and left the city that bluesman Sleepy John Estes once called “the center of all evil in the known universe.”

Dempsey and Lil took the train to Chicago, where they hoped to build a new life. Unknown to Dempsey, Chicago had a thriving jazz scene that attracted the best of the New Orleans players, all hoping for a better payday. Chicago and Memphis were more alike than Dempsey realized, in that both were riddled with crime and political corruption, and both had unresolved racial problems. The main way the two cities differed, though, was that Chicago nightclubs did not have a protective attitude toward women.

As a result, women musicians in Chicago were a rarity. Women were allowed to front bands as singers, or as glorified hostesses, but they were not allowed to have equal status with men as musicians. Lil Hardin was destined to change all that, although in the beginning she seemed an unlikely candidate for leadership. At nineteen, she looked more like fourteen. Diminutive in stature and not especially well developed in her hips or bust, she had a slender, girlish appearance that camouflaged her age and experience.

Lil continued her music education in Chicago, not with structured lessons, but with sheet music purchased on a regular basis. Her second summer in Chicago, when she would have been twenty, she strolled into Jones Music Store on South State Street and asked the “demonstrator” if he would play a particular piece of sheet music for her. (In those days, music stores kept demonstrators on duty as sales aides.) The demonstrator did as she requested, but Lil let it be known that she was disappointed in the way he played the music. She asked if she could give it a try. The demonstrator, who thought Lil was much younger than she was, was so impressed with her playing ability that he offered her an “after school” job.

It was while Lil was working at the music store that she met legendary ragtime pianist Jelly Roll Morton, who stopped by the store one day to visit friends. “He was standing up by the door, and he was looking and people were playing, so he didn’t say a word, just sat down,” Lil later recalled. “I paid no attention to him at first. I didn’t know who he was, you know. There were so many people there. So he sat down and he started a playing—oh, boy, oh, boy—and I started jumping up. The place was rockin’ and the people were jumping up, keeping up with him, and I was jumpin’ higher than anybody.”

Lil’s brush with greatness that day had a profound impact on her. She realized then that playing in a jazz band was what she wanted most in life. Unfortunately, she had few options. With only two types of musical entertainment available in the city—ragtime and symphonic music for white residents, and low-down blues and jazz for African Americans—Lil had no choice, really, and was further limited because the only female performers welcomed in black nightclubs were singers such as Memphisborn Alberta Hunter. At that time, Hunter was performing in South Side clubs that catered mostly to prostitutes and pimps. Women were welcome there as prostitutes, or as escorts for male customers, but not as musicians.

Lil didn’t know it when she took the job at the music store, but the owner, Mrs. Jennie Jones, also booked talent for South Side nightclubs. When Lil learned that her boss was influential with the city’s jazz performers, she begged for a booking. Mrs. Jones was so impressed by Lil’s talent—attracting customers by sitting in the store window and playing the piano for hours at a time—that she agreed to do what she could to find her work as a musician.

The obstacles were formidable. Not many bands had arrangements for pianos, and fewer still had any interest in hiring a woman. It looked bleak for Lil, until Lawrence Duhe strolled into the store looking for work for his New Orleans Creole Jazz Band. Lil was there that day, and she certainly knew who he was. His band was the first New Orleans jazz band to make a splash in Chicago. She also knew that Duhe had created a stir by hiring a group of female singers.

Jones booked the band at a West Side Chinese restaurant. After the first night or two, they realized that they needed a piano player to perform the requests received from the restaurant’s sophisticated clientele. Mrs. Jones promptly sent them a piano player, but he played Chicago style, and the band needed someone who could handle their New Orleans style of jazz. Lil had never been to New Orleans, nor was she familiar with New Orleans style arrangements, but Mrs. Jones sent her anyway, correctly guessing that Lil’s extraordinary talents for improvisation would enable her to blend right in.

When Lil arrived at the restaurant for the audition, she asked Duhe what number they would play first and in what key. Duhe was horrified. None of them could read music.

“I don’t know what key,” he answered. “When you hear two knocks, just start playing.”

Two knocks later, Lil jumped into the song and played all over the keyboard, allowing her keen ear to guide her fingers to the correct key. Several songs later, Duhe told her that she had the job, to which one of the band members, thinking that she was much younger than twenty, responded, “Oh, they will put us under the jail.”

Lil was an enormous success. When patrons asked her name, she told them that she was called “Hot Miss Lil.” Indeed she was. There was something about her high, neon-sweating energy that drew all eyes to the piano, even though she dressed like a man and had a schoolmarm primness about her.

Lil was an overnight sensation at the age of twenty. This woman, who had never in her life been into a nightclub on the arm of a man—indeed, had never really even dated a man—was the talk of the town. The New Orleans Creole Jazz Band made the rounds of the most popular nightclubs in Chicago, with “Hot Miss Lil” matching the men in the band note for note, a feat that made her quite an attraction with the public.

Despite the band’s success, Duhe had a difficult time keeping everyone together. Players came and went with alarming frequency. After going through a string of trumpet players, he imported a cornet player from New Orleans named King Oliver. Quiet and unassuming at first, Oliver grew more aggressive with time, eventually becoming critical of the other players, creating so much dissension that Duhe finally got fed up and quit his own band, leaving the New Orleans Creole Jazz Band in Oliver’s manipulative hands.

Lil, too, left the band, taking a job as the house pianist at the Dreamland Ballroom. There she backed guest performers such as Alberta Hunter, who was attracted to Lil’s beauty and her aggressive piano style. About Lil, Hunter once said: “All you had to do—we knew nothing about arrangements, keys, nothing—all you had to do was sing something like ‘Make Me Love You.’ And she would [be] gone. She could play anything in this world and could play awhile. She was marvelous.”

Lil eventually rejoined the New Orleans Creole Jazz Band, after King Oliver made her feel indispensable to their cause—as indeed she was. It was during her second stint with the band that Oliver decided to bring in a second-chair cornet player, a whiz from New Orleans named Louis Armstrong. Lil hated him at first sight. His hair was too long, with bangs that hung down over his forehead, and his clothes were obviously refugees from a second-hand store. On top of that, he weighed in at 226 pounds. Lil thought Oliver had lost his mind. Later, when asked to describe her first reaction to Louis, the word that gathered the most resonance was “disgusted.”

Louis felt differently. Married at the time, he immediately fell in love with Lil and wasted no time pursuing her affections. It was a tough sell. By then she had married and had established herself as a major star. Louis was a dud as a charmer and he fared even worse as a conversationalist. The only potent weapon he had in his arsenal was his talent—and he used that to his advantage.

Lil fell in love with his playing long before she fell in love with him. That love crossed the line to romance on the night Freddie Keppard, the famous trumpet player, strolled up to the bandstand in between numbers and asked Louis for his horn. Keppard blew his best stuff; then he handed the trumpet back to Louis. Lil leaned over and whispered to Louis, “Now go get him!”

Louis turned loose with the best trumpet playing Lil had ever heard. Devastated by Louis’s skill, Keppard slipped out the back door and never again asked to borrow Louis’s horn. Lil fell in love with Louis on the spot. Not long after that, she separated from her husband and Louis separated from his wife. They started dating, and became black Chicago’s most visible power couple.

“She used to tell me her troubles concerning her married life, and I would tell her mine,” Louis later recalled. “It seemed as though we felt so sorry for each other we decided out of a clear skies [sic] to get together for good.”

Lil and Louis were married on February 5, 1924. Not long after they were married, Lil told Louis that she did not wish to be married to a second trumpet. Stunned, Louis asked what she meant. Lil explained that she felt he was too talented to play behind a trumpet player who had less talent.

“I can’t play first. Joe’s [Oliver] playing first.”

“That’s why you have to quit.”

“I can’t quit Mr. Joe. Mr. Joe sent for me and I can’t quit him.” “Well, it’s Mr. Joe or me!”

Louis chose wisely and never looked back. Lil took charge of his career—put together a band for him, arranged bookings—and encouraged Louis to make his first recordings. In November 1925, she arranged for Louis to record a series of songs for Okeh Records. She helped him put together a recording band that included herself on piano, and she named the group Louis Armstrong and the Hot Fives, a derivative of her own “Hot Miss Lil” title.

By then, Lil had become a prolific songwriter, and knew the value of original songs. She took three of her tunes to the session: “My Heart,” “My Heart Will Always Lead Me Back to You,” and “(Yes) I’m in the Barrel.” Louis took one of his own songs, “Gut Bucket Blues.” Most historians consider the work that came out of that session to be the first jazz songs ever recorded.

From that point on, Louis’s career skyrocketed. Lil continued to write songs for him—“King of the Zulus,” “Lonesome Blues,” “Jazz Lips,” and “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,” a masterpiece that brought Louis much success—and she continued to play in sessions with him, but as his fame increased their marriage suffered.

Eventually, Lil and Louis divorced, although they stayed in contact. Lil went on to have a solid career of her own as a band leader, prolific songwriter, and clothing designer, but she never came close to achieving the same level of fame as Louis. Her contributions to American music were largely relegated to footnote status, even though her songs continued to be recorded by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, Billie Holiday, and Peggy Lee.

When Lil Hardin Armstrong began her career, she had no female role models, white or black, to draw on for inspiration. She made it up as she went along, listening to an inner voice that always seemed to keep her on track. At that time, women could front bands or make records, but they could not influence the direction of music with their songs or their business savvy. Women performers of that era were put in the same category as prostitutes. Indeed, some female performers of that era, including Memphis Minnie and Billie Holiday, did work as prostitutes.

Memphis Minnie, who grew up in tiny Walls, Mississippi, began her performance career with the Ringling Brothers circus, which taught her how to use her adolescent sexuality to attract male customers. By the time she started working in Memphis nightclubs, she had a reputation among other musicians as a violence-prone hothead who turned tricks when necessary to supplement her income. “They tell me she shot one old man’s arms off, down in Mississippi,” bluesman Johnny Shines told authors Paul and Beth Garon. “Shot his arm off, or cut it off with a hatchet, something. Some say shot, some say cut. Minnie was a hellraiser, I know that!”

Minnie was a major figure on Beale Street throughout the 1920s, and after the release of her first record in 1929, she dominated the national blues scene with classic recordings such as “Bumble Bee” and “I’m Talking About You.” What set her apart from other female blues artists was her extraordinary talent on the guitar, an instrument that was not then associated with female performers. Indeed, perhaps because of its hourglass shape and phallic neck design, it was considered a man’s instrument, one that women were discouraged from playing, for fear of appearing salacious.

Minnie had a profound influence on female attitudes toward the guitar, but the music she loved ultimately did not return that love. She spent her final days in poverty, confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed, unable to speak, weeping over the unkindness that life had bestowed upon her. Alone and forgotten at the time of her death, she was buried in an unmarked grave.

Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, began her life in Baltimore much as Memphis Minnie ended hers: In extreme poverty. The daughter of a jazz guitarist who toured with Fletcher Henderson’s band, she was abandoned by her father at an early age and was raised primarily by her mother. She dropped out of school in the fifth grade and found a job in a brothel, where the madam paid her to run errands and wash the toilets. While she was working in the brothel, she heard her first jazz record, a song called “West End Blues,” written by King Oliver and recorded by Louis Armstrong. She was shocked that Armstrong could evoke such “beautiful feelings” without singing actual words. Years later, she admitted that she copied her vocal style from Armstrong’s singing and playing, even to the point of lifting his music note for note for her phrasing. It was during those years, when she was desperate for money, that she was arrested for prostitution, even though she was still a minor.

When Billie and her mother moved to Harlem, she applied for a job as a dancer at a speakeasy and was told that there were no openings. So she auditioned as a jazz and blues singer instead. The club owner was knocked out by her voice and offered her a job. Over the next several years, she made the rounds of the Harlem nightclubs, slowly building a reputation as a jazz singer. Not until 1933 did she attract the attention of producer John Hammond, who told friends that she was the best singer he had ever heard. Hammond got her studio work with two of the most successful big-band leaders of the day—Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington—and helped her launch a recording career that led to some of the best jazz records ever made.

In 1935, while fronting Count Basie’s band, she was told that she was too light-skinned to perform out on the road with black bands. People might mistake her for a white woman, and that would mean big trouble. Those were sensitive times racially, so she took the advice to “go white” and auditioned for Artie Shaw’s band, becoming the first black vocalist to travel with a white orchestra. She soon became the highest paid entertainer in New York, a small consolation considering that, despite her star status, she still had to enter nightclubs, hotels, and restaurants through the back entrance.

After Billie Holiday formed a recording partnership with saxophonist Lester Young, she released a series of records, including “This Year’s Kisses” and “Mean to Me,” that established her as a major artist. She found stardom very stressful, however. Not only was she faced with the demands of delivering a perfect performance each time she stepped out into the spotlight, she was routinely attacked by racists who were envious of her success. In 1939, she released a record titled “Strange Fruit,” a moving song about lynching. She followed that success with “God Bless the Child” and “Gloomy Sunday,” songs that expressed the growing inner turmoil she felt.

Perplexed by a troubled world that seemed to offer no sanctuary, she retreated into heroin addiction and spent most of the 1940s in a drug-induced haze. Despite her personal problems, her celebrity grew. “When you saw her, it was just so different than any other person you’d seen onstage singing,” recalled baseball great Buck O’Neill. “The way she would sell a song—anybody else could sing that song, and when Lady Day [the nickname given to her by Lester Young] sang it, it was a different song altogether.”

By the late 1940s, Billie was arrested so many times for drug offenses that she was barred from performing in NewYork nightclubs. Frustrated by her legal troubles and her faltering voice, she added alcoholism to her list of personal demons. By the late 1950s, with her weight down to only 100 pounds, she often had to be led on stage, where she stood and rolled her head when she sang, spit trickling down her chin.

On May 30, 1959, she collapsed and was taken to Knickerbocker Hospital in NewYork. Doctors smelled alcohol on her breath and found needle tracks on her arms, so they transferred her to a public hospital where she could be treated for addiction.

When Billie was tracked down by her personal physician, he found her on an unattended stretcher in a hallway. Eleven days after she was admitted to the hospital, nurses found traces of cocaine in her room and called the police. Although Billie was barely conscious, police officers fingerprinted her and photographed her for a mug shot. Before she could be transferred to the Women’s House of Detention, she lapsed into a coma and died, leaving an estate worth only $1,345.36.

Paralleling Billie Holiday’s slide from grace was the rise and fall of Judy Garland, who began her career in the movies at the age of fourteen with a role in 1936’s Every Sunday, starring Deanna Durbin. Subsequently, she was paired with established child star Mickey Rooney in a succession of films in the Andy Hardy series. Movie executives knew they had a star on their hands, but they didn’t realize how big a star until she sang “Dear Mr. Gable” in her third film, Broadway Melody of 1938. That led to a role in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, in which she sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” the song that made her a major movie star and launched her career as a recording artist.

Garland released nearly 100 singles and over a dozen albums, one of which, Judy at Carnegie Hall (1961), received five Grammy awards, including album of the year. Throughout the 1940s, her recording career was dictated by her movie career, since studios wanted to pair hit songs with hit movies, but she was eventually able to stand alone as a recording artist. Perceived by some as white America’s answer to Billie Holiday, Alberta Hunter, and Bessie Smith, Garland was considered one of the greatest entertainers of her day, a troublesome distinction that almost certainly contributed to her Billie Holiday-like attraction to alcohol and drugs. By the time she died at age forty-seven of an overdose of barbiturates, she had attempted suicide several times.

America had peculiar requirements of female recording artists during the first half of the twentieth century. It wasn’t enough to have superior voices, or even stunning looks. The qualities that the public found irresistible clustered around the self-destructive personas radiating from desperate lives made torturous by public displays of promiscuity, drug addiction, and violence. Audiences flocked to see them with the same perverse attraction they usually reserved for train wrecks or hotel fires.

Billie Holiday and Judy Garland always knew that they were loved. Indeed, they thrived on the daily reminders of public adoration that they received. But their worst fear was to be adored for all the wrong reasons. In the end, that fear was what hurt them the most.

What Lil Hardin Armstrong began on a high moral plane in the 1920s ran into trouble in the 1930s and 1940s, as the pressures of success in a man’s world and the unceasing degradation of racism evolved into an emotional torture chamber for women aspiring to a high level of success in the music industry. What was needed to take up the slack in Lil’s Revolution was a woman, preferably a photogenic white woman, with a voice that could be convincing in either blues or jazz—and, most important, nerves of steel!

Born Norma Egstrom on May 26, 1920, Peggy Lee was raised in a small North Dakota farm town by parents of Norwegian and Swedish heritage. Blonde and attractive, she seemed an unlikely person to ever achieve fame as a jazz singer. Her first-generation American parents loved music, but not the gritty sounds emanating from Chicago and New Orleans during the Jazz Age. Peggy was encouraged to participate in her school glee club and her church choir, but no one ever considered singing as a potential occupation for her—at least not until she was eight, when she announced to the world that she wanted to be in show business when she grew up. As evidence of her determination, she learned the popular songs of the day, such as “Moonglow” and “In My Solitude.”

Peggy was so convincing in her argument that soon everyone believed that she was destined for stardom. While still a pre-teen, she performed with Doc Haines and his orchestra, who always introduced her as their “little Hollywood girl.” Soon she landed her own radio show, for which she was paid five dollars a night and all the food she could eat in the restaurant that sponsored her show. That led to a performance on WD AY in Fargo, the most important radio station in that part of the state. Before the show began, the announcer pulled her aside and told her that she needed to change her name. Norma Egstrom just didn’t have the right resonance for radio, he insisted. He suggested that she call herself Peggy Lee, and she did.

Almost immediately after her high school graduation, eighteen-year-old Peggy gathered her life savings (eighteen dollars) and a railroad pass that belonged to her father (he worked for the railroad) and struck out for Hollywood to share a boarding house room with a family friend. Unfortunately, Hollywood did not give her the greeting she expected. The only work she could find was as a short-order cook and waitress. When that job played out, she got work as a barker at a local carnival, where she urged passers-by to “hit the wino with the baseball.” It was one of those booths in which a down-on-his-luck transient sat on a perch above a tank of water and waited for the baseball throw that would send him tumbling into the tank. While working at the carnival, two guitarists who were nephews of one of the concessionaires heard Peggy sing. They talked her into hitchhiking back to Hollywood to audition at a popular nightclub named the Jade.

On the way to the audition, her flimsy shoes fell apart and she walked into the nightclub barefoot to sing for the master of ceremonies. He hired her that day. Peggy thought she had hit the big time, although her two-dollars-a-night salary was not enough to enable her to buy the Chinese fare offered in the nightclub. Instead, she frequented the street vendor outside, where she purchased foot-long hot dogs for only ten cents.

Everything went well at the Jade, until one night when the owner invited her to sit at the table with him and a man she had never seen before. The man offered to give her a lift home after work, and since he seemed to be a friend of her boss, she accepted. Once they left the parking lot, she noticed he was driving in the wrong direction. When she pointed that out to him, he said he was hungry and wanted her to join him for a late dinner. She protested, but he assured her it would be all right.

Peggy’s heart sank when they pulled up outside a shabby-looking nightclub. Inside, they joined several women and two men, who made it a point to sit on either side of Peggy in the booth. “The man on my left tried to make a little conversation, but I was too frightened to talk and too busy praying,” she later wrote in her autobiography. “We both watched Sam [the man who brought her there] getting drunker by the minute, which this man seemed to think was a little unusual. Suddenly he whispered to me, ‘I’m going to get you out of here. Follow me, stick close.’

“We scooted out of the booth, and Sam suddenly loomed up in front of my friend. There was a terrible fight, and, fortunately for me, my new friend won. The next minute we were rushing out of the club and running for the car.

“When we were safely out of the area and he was breathing a little more easily, he said, ‘Look you don’t know what you just got away from, but I’m going to tell you. I don’t know why I should do this, but you remind me of my little sister. You, young lady, were headed for white slavery, and nobody would have heard from you again. Nobody.’”

Many years later, when she ran into her rescuer again at a function at her daughter’s school, Peggy asked him why he had been so mysterious that evening. He answered, “I was a G-man.”

Not long after her rescue from her would-be abductor, she had to be rescued from a riptide while swimming in the ocean. She almost drowned. She wrote her sisters about the incident, and they arranged for her old high school boyfriend to drive out to Hollywood and bring her back to North Dakota. Peggy was so angry, not just at her ex-boyfriend and her sisters, but at herself as well for failing, that she barely spoke on the long drive back.

As it turned out, her return to North Dakota was the first step that led to her big break. She quickly found work at radio station WDAY and at the Powers Hotel and Coffee Shop, the best music venue in Fargo. That led to a booking with Sev Olson’s band in Minneapolis, which led to her joining Will Osborne’s band. After a series of bookings around the country, the band traveled to Palm Springs, California, where Peggy found work at the Doll House, a popular spot for movie actors.

At that point in her career, Peggy had not developed a distinctive style of her own. That occurred at the Doll House when she tried lowering her voice in an effort to silence what could sometimes be a boisterous crowd. The softer she sang, the more attention she received from the audience. Actually, Peggy was ahead of her time. Decades later, media researchers discovered that “cool” images offered the most powerful visual and auditory stimuli on television and radio. Peggy learned from experience that the “cooler” she was toward the audience, the more people seemed to appreciate her.

In 1941, at the age of twenty-one, she took her new vocal style to a booking at the Ambassador West Hotel in Chicago, where Benny Goodman, the most popular bandleader in America at that time, dropped by to hear her sing. Peggy did not know it, but Goodman’s girl singer, Helen Forrest, had decided to join Artie Shaw’s band in an apparent dispute with Goodman over money.

The next morning, Goodman called Peggy’s apartment and spoke to her roommate, telling her that he wanted to offer Peggy a job. When Peggy received the message, she thought it was a joke at first, not believing it until she dialed the number left with her roommate and heard the band leader’s voice on the other end of the line.

Goodman didn’t waste any time gabbing: He told her that he wanted her to join his band. Shocked, Peggy said she would be delighted. All he said in response was, “Come to work and wear something pretty.” Peggy got the most sought-after job in music, without ever going through the trauma of an audition. Goodman liked what he had heard at the Ambassador and didn’t feel he needed to hear more.

Peggy showed up for work wearing a nice dress, as requested, and received yet another shock—there would be no rehearsal. She was simply handed a list of the songs she would sing that night. Luckily, she knew them all. Peggy went to extraordinary lengths to forge a career as a popular singer—and in the end all she needed was to be in the right place at the right time.

The first night went well enough, or so she thought. The next morning she was horrified to learn she had been savaged by the critics. Later, Downbeat magazine ran a photograph of her with the caption: “Sweet Sixteen and Will Never Be Missed.” Peggy was so discouraged that she told Goodman she wanted to quit. His only response was, “I won’t let you.”

Within days after joining Goodman’s band, Peggy was sent to a recording studio with producer John Hammond to make a record with Goodman and his band. The night before, Hammond gave Peggy the sheet music to a song titled “Elmer’s Tune,” expecting her to know it from top to bottom when she arrived at the session. She did, but the session was a harrowing experience because in those pre-tape days, artists could not stop and back up to correct mistakes. It was a live performance, and everything had to be perfect.

At a subsequent session, Peggy brought her wind-up phonograph and a recording of Lil Green’s “Why Don’t You Do Right?” to play for the bandleader. Goodman paid Peggy ten dollars to record the song, with no royalties. At the time, she thought it was probably a good deal since her weekly salary was only seventy-five dollars. To everyone’s surprise, the record was a smash hit and sold over one million copies. It made Peggy famous, but she never benefited financially beyond the ten-dollar recording fee she collected for the session.