Peggy Lee
Capitol Collectors Series
Vol. 1: The Early Years

Easy Listening

Peggy Lee credited the big bands with her training, and her sense of rhythm and timing is a testament to these roots. It's after her departure from the big bands that we find her becoming a remarkable and distinctive interpreter of song, as on this CD. These tracks mark her debut as a solo act; they are a world away from her output with the Benny Goodman orchestra. Many of these 1945-50 recordings were hits, and the success of these songs lies solely with Peggy Lee's vocals. Supported by great backup, it's her soft emotion on "Golden Earrings", "Bali Hai", and "'Deed I Do" that transforms these tunes into more than mere melodies. Certainly Lee seems to have learned something from the great blues singers, Billie Holiday, Mildred Bailey, and Jimmy Rushing, who, like Peggy Lee herself, felt a personal connection to each song they sang.

Over 1,000 barbed and brilliant definitions by the 19th-century journalist and satirist often called “the American Swift.” Congratulations are “the civility of envy.” A coward is “one who in an emergency thinks with his legs.” A historian is a “broad-gauge gossip,” more. H. L. Mencken called these “some of the most gorgeous witticisms in the English language.

Ethics, social responsibility, leadership, governance. These terms are heard in the classroom, in the boardroom, and viewed on the front page of newspapers and magazines. Yet serious attention to the relationships among these concepts is lacking. Although commitments to leadership, ethics, and social responsibility are evident, individuals and companies are falling short in combining these duties into policies and cultures that guide behavior and decisions. The missing element is a broad-based and integrated approach to responsible leadership and governance. This volume provides the leading thinking on these issues and includes a discussion of emerging areas that require future attention. The contributors - leading scholars in the fields of leadership, governance and social responsibility - summarize the state of the literature, identify complementary insights and perspectives, discuss areas of conflict and disagreement, and include a provocative and stimulating agenda for further investigation. They point up practical consequences of these perspectives in light of developments that have exposed the shortcomings in practice. Several contributors focus specifically on the challenges faced by global companies in developing and maintaining leadership and governance practices that are responsive to different national institutional and cultural settings. Thorough coverage and insightful discussion make this an essential reference for scholars and students of leadership, corporate responsibility and professional ethics, as well as for all those directly responsible for establishing the ethical codes and practices of their organizations.