A small detail lodged inside the new Peggy Lee My Guitar EP tells the larger story most efficiently: the two previously unheard recordings at its heart were cut on 22 June and 24 June 1961, according to the Peggy Lee Discography, and then sat untouched in Capitol Records’ vault for more than six decades. Their release now, as part of the five-track digital EP My Guitar à la Lee, arriving 21 August via Capitol Records and Universal Music Enterprises, marks the 60th anniversary of Lee’s 1966 album Guitars à la Lee.
Two Takes, Five Years Apart: The Peggy Lee My Guitar EP and Its Vault Sessions
The two sessions from June 1961 were recorded during work on If You Go, arranged and conducted by Quincy Jones. Both takes were set aside at the time and never made it to a release. What the Peggy Lee Discography’s detailed session logs confirm is the precision of that dormancy: recorded across two consecutive days in Hollywood, the performances were shelved and remained so until now.
Robert Vosgien of RV Mastering has restored and remastered both recordings from the original Capitol session tapes, returning them to something close to their first-cut condition. Hearing them in sequence with the version Lee eventually committed to for Guitars à la Lee in 1966 is an instructive exercise. The earlier takes carry a more exploratory quality, the song not yet settled into the shape Lee and guitarist Bob Bain would give it five years later. Bain’s final arrangement for the 1966 album is the one most listeners will know, and the contrast between that and these 1961 approaches illuminates how a song can remain alive in a writer’s or performer’s imagination long after a first attempt.
Holly Foster Wells, Lee’s granddaughter and president of Peggy Lee Associates, offered the most direct account of what the recordings communicate. ‘These recordings show my grandmother still searching for the song’s final shape, five years before she found it,’ she said. ‘Hearing both takes side by side is like watching her think.’ It is a precise observation: the EP functions less as a reissue than as a kind of creative document, a record of process rather than conclusion.
The 1966 Album and What the EP Draws From It
Guitars à la Lee was a concept album built around a single instrument and the range of things it could do. Lee worked with seven guitarists on the record, among them Bain, Laurindo Almeida, Herb Ellis, and Al Hendrickson, moving across jazz, bossa nova, Brazilian and Latin influences, pop, and standards. The guitar was not merely accompaniment here but the organising idea, placed in dialogue with Lee’s vocals across a set of material that drew from several traditions at once.
The new EP includes three tracks from that original album alongside the two 1961 vault recordings: ‘Sweet Happy Life’, ‘Nice ‘n’ Easy’, and Lee’s interpretation of Tony Hatch’s ‘Call Me’. Together, they give a listener enough of Guitars à la Lee to understand its character, while the 1961 sessions provide the before-picture that the album alone could never have supplied.
The EP is the second release in recent months drawing on Lee’s work from 1966. Last month, her recording of ‘Big Spender’ received a club remix from electronic producer duo Girl Math, also marking that recording’s 60th anniversary. The remix was released alongside an animated visualiser inspired by the Bob Fosse-choreographed sequence in the 1966 film Sweet Charity. The two projects together suggest a sustained effort by the estate to bring Lee’s mid-sixties catalogue back into active circulation, each release working a different angle: one oriented towards contemporary club culture, the other towards archival recovery.
The pairing of the 1961 takes with the 1966 finished version is the more archivally consequential move. What remained in a Hollywood vault since those two June days in 1961 is now in general circulation, the gap between the exploratory and the resolved finally closed. My Guitar à la Lee is released 21 August.
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