Well, K., it's not that I have anything against "Fever," apart from having heard it a trillion times or so. It's just that to my ears, it doesn't compare with this 1946 nugget, from not long after she left Benny Goodman. Singing doesn't get much more post-coital than this - for the time, particularly. Any woman who could pull off this song the way Peggy does will never be wanting for male admir...
To make a few bucks while unemployed, I took the assignment of compiling a CD that was going to be released as romantic favorites of a famous -- what should we call it? -- 'TV food personality' is pretty accurate. She insisted that we include 'As Time Goes By' by Louis Armstrong. This proved to be a tricky request, since Louis Armstrong never made a recording of 'As Time Goes By.' I communicate...
It isn't an I’m-so-happy-I-could-die love song; it isn't teen infatuation (not that there’s anything wrong with that) or tormented torch. It's a mellow, wistful, grow-old-with-me declaration, rendered in the tenderest manner. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote it in 1937; some of the usual suspects (Torme, Crosby, Grappelli, Hartman, Krall, Simone) have had a go at it. Here's Miss Pegg