Lee Wiley on Social Media
Lee Wiley
@Lee-Wiley-57324662413
· A jazz singer born October 9, 1908 in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, she moved to New York at a young age. Was a contemporary (and artistic peer) of Mildred Bailey and Billie Holiday, but her career was plagued by accident and illness. Perhaps best remembered now for the "composer" albums she recorded at the turn of the 40's for small independent music shops (Liberty, Rabson's, Schirmer's.) Each album covered eight songs by one composer or songwriting team (George & Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, and Harold Arlen) with Lee accompanied by a small band. They were quite ahead of their time, setting the template for many "songbook" albums by other singers, such as Ella Fitzgerald, in the 50's. There was also the notable later-career album "West Of the Moon" from 1956, recently re-released on CD by Mosaic. In the liner notes of the latter album, Dave Garroway is quoted thusly: "There are probably only a dozen singers who have their own individual sound, quite apart for the sounds that others have made before them, and surely Lee Wiley is one of these. On everything she does there is a marvelous texture to her voice, something like running your hand over a piece of fine Harris tweed---and they both tickle. Many another singer is just discovering the importance of the sense of the words in a lyric. Lee has known all about words or some time now." Later in the same notes, the writer aptly states: "Lee voices many of her phrases with the throaty intonation of a middle register cornet. She also has the unique facility, like Mildred Bailey and Ella Fitzgerald, of singing a song as if the composer had written it for her alone." I feel that Lee Wiley is too little-known or talked about these days. She was simply one of the best.
