The Private Canon: Make Room for "Sans Souci"
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Peggy Lee occupies a rare perch in the vocal pop pantheon: She's not quite in the exalted ranks of Ella or Sarah as a jazz technician, nor quite in the class of Judy or Frank as a song interpreter. Yet there's something singular and arresting about her voice and her attitude—an icy remoteness belied by a kind of unbiddable intensity (or is that vice versa?). A certain insouciance, you might even say.
Which may be why the song I think of when I think of Peggy Lee, and my favorite of her recordings, is "Sans Souci," a simmering bit of exotica she wrote with Sonny Burke as a sort of follow-up to her outrageous, mind-blowing cover of "Lover," a breakthrough hit for her in 1952 (and definitely my close second favorite of her records, and yes, of course, I also love "Is That All There Is?," though I don't rate it as highly as mid-period Peggy). Like that piece, "Sans Souci" features what would be a show-stealing arrangement by the orchestral savant Gordon Jenkins, if not for Lee's transcendent vocal, floating like hookah smoke over the very open-aired sound of the orchestra.
Indeed, the whiff of Orientalism is unavoidable here, as the melody leans heavily on the Algerian scale, used frequently in North African and Berber music, and Jenkins's arrangement is rife with popping congas and glissandoing harp. Adding to the exoticism, the anthropomorphic lyrics invoke a mountain stream that "giggles" and the "squawking" of the earth when true love walks upon it. Mostly the song tells of a hasty water retreat from either a full-blown witch hunt or simply the social opprobrium of a small-minded town. As a chorus repeats the odd chant, "Go, boat, go, go," Lee intones, not entirely regretfully, "They got no room here for someone like me." And in a chilling counter-accusation of those who would judge her, she elaborates in a dusky mid range, over a backdrop of indignant strings and spiky pizzicato accents:
That hair-raising, deliciously bitter lyric is matched by her later insistence that "love is walking" on the earth, and "you ain't no dream," over a sudden Ab7 chord and a biting Gb-Eb-Eb stab from the strings, in case you missed her defiance. She could be singing that "you" reassuringly to herself, but more likely this gives us a hint that she has some welcome company on her aquatic getaway. So that when she says, wistfully, "Fill your sails with all the laughing and talking that used to be," it's not an altogether unhappy image. She and her lover are leaving behind a hateful and backward place, and good riddance.
What sticks about "San Souci" is that, for all the song's atmospherics and drama, there's a sense that she's not play-acting here; you can feel the heat of sincere rage in her renunciation of the world's double standards. As she later told a biographer, "I've tried to figure out why I was so angry when I wrote that." Well, I haven't read the bio, so I can't venture a guess. But I've always thought of Peggy Lee a bit like the dark doppelganger of Doris Day: two German-American blondes from the Midwest who started out singing with big bands, then found success as soloists in the 1950s. Where Day epitomized scrubbed-cheek '50s Americana (rightly or wrongly—I think she's a much more interesting figure than the caricature), Lee embodied a Mae West-like bad-girl flipside. Can you picture Day singing "Fever" or Lee singing "Que Sera Sera"?
Peggy Lee occupies a rare perch in the vocal pop pantheon: She's not quite in the exalted ranks of Ella or Sarah as a jazz technician, nor quite in the class of Judy or Frank as a song interpreter. Yet there's something singular and arresting about her voice and her attitude—an icy remoteness belied by a kind of unbiddable intensity (or is that vice versa?). A certain insouciance, you might even say.
Which may be why the song I think of when I think of Peggy Lee, and my favorite of her recordings, is "Sans Souci," a simmering bit of exotica she wrote with Sonny Burke as a sort of follow-up to her outrageous, mind-blowing cover of "Lover," a breakthrough hit for her in 1952 (and definitely my close second favorite of her records, and yes, of course, I also love "Is That All There Is?," though I don't rate it as highly as mid-period Peggy). Like that piece, "Sans Souci" features what would be a show-stealing arrangement by the orchestral savant Gordon Jenkins, if not for Lee's transcendent vocal, floating like hookah smoke over the very open-aired sound of the orchestra.
Indeed, the whiff of Orientalism is unavoidable here, as the melody leans heavily on the Algerian scale, used frequently in North African and Berber music, and Jenkins's arrangement is rife with popping congas and glissandoing harp. Adding to the exoticism, the anthropomorphic lyrics invoke a mountain stream that "giggles" and the "squawking" of the earth when true love walks upon it. Mostly the song tells of a hasty water retreat from either a full-blown witch hunt or simply the social opprobrium of a small-minded town. As a chorus repeats the odd chant, "Go, boat, go, go," Lee intones, not entirely regretfully, "They got no room here for someone like me." And in a chilling counter-accusation of those who would judge her, she elaborates in a dusky mid range, over a backdrop of indignant strings and spiky pizzicato accents:
Tried to tell me I was evil
Tried to trample on my soul
Tried to make me think that they were righteous
But the cloth of the lie was whole
What sticks about "San Souci" is that, for all the song's atmospherics and drama, there's a sense that she's not play-acting here; you can feel the heat of sincere rage in her renunciation of the world's double standards. As she later told a biographer, "I've tried to figure out why I was so angry when I wrote that." Well, I haven't read the bio, so I can't venture a guess. But I've always thought of Peggy Lee a bit like the dark doppelganger of Doris Day: two German-American blondes from the Midwest who started out singing with big bands, then found success as soloists in the 1950s. Where Day epitomized scrubbed-cheek '50s Americana (rightly or wrongly—I think she's a much more interesting figure than the caricature), Lee embodied a Mae West-like bad-girl flipside. Can you picture Day singing "Fever" or Lee singing "Que Sera Sera"?
But this isn't just about attitude, it's about ownership. That Lee co-wrote "Sans Souci," as well as a number of her great songs ("I Didn't Know About You," "Don't Smoke in Bed," "He's a Tramp"), means that she's not "merely" interpreting a role someone handed her. She helped make the frame for the picture she's in. And the sinuous "Sans Souci" is a particularly splendid frame for her twilight brilliance.
Interestingly, this demo-type version helped me hear the harmonies more clearly.
I also found this odd instrumental verison—odd in that without really changing the harmony, the arranger, Alex Stordahl, manages to drain all the venom and sex from the piece.
A much more satisfying cover, faithful but not at all slavish, comes courtesy of Lucy Woodward.
The opening bass part is fun, so I transcribed it:
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