Lil Green - Blues & Rhythm Series 5072: The Chronological Lil Green 1940-1941 (2003)

Lil Green was a fine blues singer who is often remembered merely as a footnote to the Peggy Lee story. The two women were linked by the song "Why Don't You Do Right?," originally recorded in 1936 by the Harlem Hamfats as the "Weed Smoker's Dream." Its composer Kansas Joe McCoy modified the words and changed the title for Lil Green, who recorded it with Big Bill Broonzy in 1941. Fast forward to July 1942, when the Benny Goodman Orchestra backed North Dakota native Peggy Lee (née Norma Deloris Egstrom) on a career-defining rendition of this disarmingly honest ode to the vagaries of human nature; by the following January, it had become a lucrative hit. Peggy Lee admired Lil Green's pungent, bittersweet, tough girl delivery, and her famous cover version carried borrowed ballast from this African-American woman who led a difficult existence and passed away in 1954 before attaining the age of 35. The first of three CDs devoted exclusively to the works of Lil Green offers 20 tunes recorded between May 1940 and July 1941. "Romance in the Dark" sounds like a cousin to Lonnie Johnson's hit record "Tomorrow Night"; "I'm Going to Start a Racket" is stocked with charmingly delivered threats, and "Knockin' Myself Out (Gradually, by Degrees)" has got to be one of the most revealing accounts of casual if reckless self-medication ever caught on record. Green portrays the substance abuser's state of mind with uncanny accuracy, almost certainly because she was drawing upon personal experience. Melodically speaking, both "Love Me" and "I'm Going to Copyright Your Kisses" are very similar to "Knockin' Myself Out." Four titles by Broonzy are characteristically wonderful; indeed almost everything the man ever came up with was warmly suffused with his personal blend of musk and magnetism. Several recordings from the second half of the collection find Lil Green comfortably languishing at the crossroads of blues and small group swing. This collection and two subsequent volumes, released by the Classics reissue label in 2003, 2004, and 2005, are highly recommended for people who seek a better understanding of 20th century popular music. The combined stories of Peggy Lee's success and Lil Green's abbreviated career are representative of a pattern of cultural appropriation that has characterized the U.S. entertainment industry since the 1890s ~arwulf arwulf