OPEN POST: Manor Music Monday With The Unsung Peggy Connelly!

Greetings, fellow prostitots, and welcome to another edition of Manor Music Monday, today with a bit of skiddly-doo, bop-bop-a-loo-bob and shoobee-doobee. These words were frequently accompanied by a wink, finger guns and tap dancing leaps, all prime words and moves from the early 1960s - just before jazz at last lost its popular hold to rock, which had been near-to-obliterating it years before. Now the job was done. Finito. 

Also lost? Jazz babies, or femme jazz vocalists who were the star attraction at exclusive supper clubs, some of whom even got to cut an album or two. Like the hot-cha singing attraction, Peggy Connelly. And lucky you, tonight at the Manor's "Mack the Cat" nightclub and dinette, DJ Li'l Scratch will be playing Peggy till the early yawning hours. 

At one time the wife of "Laugh-In's" Dick Martin, Peggy was a popular model, singer, dancer, and sometime TV and movie actress, in the 1950s and 60s - and a choice escort about town for Ol' Blue Eyes below, whom she had a "serious affair" with at the apex of his career. Which meant that she had to contend with the leering likes of Jimmy Van Heusen, who, despite his legendary songwriting gifts, was a well-known sleaze and Sinatra's "whoremaster," according to Peggy (and she didn't mean it kindly). She was also no one's protege, least of all Sinatra's. "I got all my jobs myself," she once noted.

Born in Louisiana, and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, she was modeling and singing with local bands by the age of 15. Moving to NYC, then Hollywood, her career was already under way before she met Frankie. Once her style of music fell out of favor in the 60s, she did what a lot of gal jazz singers at the time did. She jetted overseas and enjoyed an entirely new career - from the early 70s through the late 90s - performing at night clubs across Europe. Her 1956 LP, "Peggy Connelly with The Russ Garcia 'Wigville' Band," is an excellent time capsule, with Peggy's sharp, tough-cookie vocals telling us a lot more than she may have intended about what women had to put up with in order to have a career at the time.

She only recorded two LPs, which barely hit the charts, and after touring in Europe, died largely forgotten by showbiz and music aficionados in 2007 (she didn't even earn a NYT's obituary, which is criminal). Fortunately, audiences are at last catching up. In 2018, "Hollywood Sessions" was released, a fantastic remastered compilation, and "Peggy Connelly with The Russ Garcia 'Wigville' Band" was remastered in 2014 . She might not have earned much notice during her time - many unjustly wrote her off as yet another Frankie plaything - but we know better, don't we? All you have to do is listen to her stirring rendition of "That Old Black Magic."

There's more Peggy right here: 

What are you listening to this week? DJ Li'l Scratch wants to know.
Till next time...purr, bitches, purr! 🐾

Photo Credits: Tempo/University of Miami Archives, MAGA, Bethlehem Record