Peggy Lee LPs to Show That’s Not All There Is

Singer Peggy Lee, who cut the last of her 59 record albums a decade ago, is about to make four new LPs. The first will be the blues.

“I’m going to do an album of old blues--Bessie Smith, Lil Green,” she said. “I’ve been a fan of Lil Green’s for a long time. That’s where I got ‘Why Don’t You Do Right.” Lil Green wrote the song.

“The first time I recorded after I came out of retirement, in 1944 or ‘45, I went down to Capitol and recorded an album of new American jazz,” she said. “I sang two blues things on it. It immediately sold. That’s how I came out of retirement. I hadn’t intended to.”

The singer didn’t expect to follow the album with any performances. “There was a big demand. I turned a lot of things down. But finally my husband talked me into it. I didn’t want to. I cried. I was the opposite of women wanting to get out of the house. I wanted to stay home.

“Being a jazz musician, he thought of me as a jazz singer. I never did. I didn’t know what I was. I just liked to think of interpreting.”

Lee became a star singing in Benny Goodman’s band from 1941 to 1943, when she retired after marrying Goodman’s guitarist, Dave Barbour. They moved to California, where their daughter Nicki was born.

Lee will spend two weeks in New York performing such favorites as “Fever,” “Manana” and “Is That All There Is?” at the Ballroom before heading off to the recording studio.

Last February, while on a bill in Las Vegas with George Burns, she fell.

“There was a steel plate embedded in the floor . . . to protect the light plugs. I always put my arms out when I come out, you know. I did that and slid on the metal plate and crashed down and broke my pelvis,” she said.

“Frankly, I prayed. A thousand things ran through my mind. I was in excruciating pain. I had them bring a chair, and I sat and sang the show. I think it was something like a bullfighter gets when they’ve been gored. They act very foolishly and go back out again with the bull.

“That meant several months in bed. I got up to swimming 40 times around the pool. I rented an exercise bicycle and overdid it. That put me back in bed for a little bit.”

She started writing her autobiography around that time.

“I know what a positive attitude can do, and I suppose I know what a negative attitude can do,” she said. “Each time I go through one of these things, when I come out the other side I’m stronger.”