Jazz, blues and nostalgia. This time with Lee Wiley.
She was a singer with a voice that dripped with melancholy and whose sound was once described as pure Southern Comfort. Lee Wiley was a dazzling beauty, combined with an explosive personality. Her father was a missionary, her mother Cherokee Indian. That is way, later on, she was called ‘the Indian Princess’ – but one of her husbands later referred to her as ‘the only witch who wasn’t burned’. When she was fifteen she ran away from home and started a life as a night club singer. She had a turbulent life in which renown men were fighting for her. Lee Wiley was ‘a musician’s singer’, a vocalist who was highly valued by musicians and in the thirties she was the first singer who started to sing ’standards’. About her singing she once said: ‘I sing just like I want to sing. I know how to breath. That is all I need. The only trick I ever apply is putting vibrato on or off’. In the fifties her beauty withered and the interest in her faded. A cruel prediction she once made turned out to be true: in an interview she once said a performing singer shouldn’t be older than 40, because singing consisted of ‘several matters’. Despite her talent she is now, after she died in 1975, completely forgotten. In this Palace of Nostalgia one hour long the great Lee Wiley.
