I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Seventeen

Peggy and I did the audition in the dusty attic of the Baltimore Theatre, me playing on a spinet stored up there. The song we agreed on was called My Heart Cries For You, an old French tune that had been adapted into a contemporary American pop song. There was nothing subtle about the lyrics-"My heart cries for you/Sighs for you/Dies for you..."-but the song had terrific popular appeal. Guy Mitchell's version was a best-selling record in the winter of '51, and later on, a ton of other singers recorded the song.

    The thing about My Heart Cries For You that made it long-range prophetic for me was that the person who reworked the song into something for American consumption was Percy Faith, a composer, conductor and all-round man of music from the city I would spend many later decades living and working in, Toronto.

   

Peggy and I got into the song in the theatre attic, and the way she sang it hit me as exactly right. Her singing was both subtle and emotional. I loved it. When we finished, Peggy seemed as happy with me as I felt with her, telling me I'd done some "nice things" on the tune. From her, that qualified as high praise.

    I recognized from the start that Peggy was on a special level. As Joe Shulman said, she never sang a note out of time or out of tune in her life. Apart from that, Peggy was one of those rare people who transcended categories of music. She came across as a Bob Farnon type in that way. Bob was a composer and arranger-also from Toronto--who didn't have much to do with jazz, but all jazz musicians loved him for the gorgeous music he wrote and arranged. It was like that with Peggy. She could sing My Heart Cries For You in a way that would knock out an ultimate jazz musician like Dizzy Gillespie and would have the same impact on an ordinary guy on the street who knew nothing about music. It didn't matter whether Peggy was or wasn't a jazz singer. The key thing was that she touched everybody who heard her.

    She touched me in the Baltimore Theatre attic. Since the feeling went both ways, I was hired as Peggy's accompanist. It was the beginning of a very good gig for me that stretched over much of the next five years.

As I got to know her better, Peggy would describe to me little details from her childhood. She talked about milking cows, and there was no doubt she started life as a country girl. She was born Norma Egstrom in 1920, the seventh of eight children who grew up in a town called Nortonville in a remote part of North Dakota. Her father was an alcoholic, and according to what Peggy said and wrote, her stepmother was horribly mean to her as a little girl. But the distinctive voice Peggy had even as a kid carried her through the obstacles of geography and family. No matter what, she was on her way to an amazing life as a singer. She got herself to California when she was still a teenager, gradually making her name first in clubs out on the coast and soon in clubs across the country.

    In the summer of 1941, Benny Goodman's then fiancée, "Lady" Alice Duckworth, heard Peggy sing in a Chicago nightclub named the College Inn. She was so taken with Peggy that she dragged Benny into the club the next night. Benny caught the excitement too, and since he needed a singer to replace Helen Forrest who was about to leave his band, he hired Peggy.

    She became hugely popular working with the band, singing on three or four hit records. Probably the song she was best known for was Why Don't You Do Right. It was a twelve-bar blues written by a guy named Kansas City Joe McCoy, and Peggy sang it in exactly the right way, just as she seemed to do with every song she ever put her voice to. But the most important personal thing that happened to her during her years in the Goodman band came when Benny hired a new guitarist in 1942. His name was Dave Barbour, and Peggy fell for him.

    Dave was a good looking guy, very bright about music and a fine guitar player. He reciprocated Peggy's feelings, but the romance between the two broke Benny's strict rule about musicians in his band never dating the girl singer. When Dave and Peggy got married, Benny fired Dave. That didn't do Benny much good because Peggy soon quit the band. That was when the two of them, Peggy and Dave, set out to make Peggy into a solo star.