Lee Wiley
Sensual and dignified, sophisticated and warm, Lee Wiley has inspired outbursts of sheer poetry from many a captivated listener. Her sound induces a marvelous, ticklish sensation, akin to running your hand over a piece of fine Harris tweed, marveled producer Dave Garroway. She blows smoke rings, each note a puff that melts into wisps of vibrato, conceptualized author Will Friedwald. Her voice and style have long since made me extremely eager to go to bed with her, disclosed critic James Frazier. Not content with this daring confession, he also bluntly labeled her one bitch of a singer.
Protested singer and Wiley scholar Barbara Lea: She had more fire, more rhythm, more roughness, more silkiness, more deep personal warmth, than the job description of Pop Singer called for. Asked writer Richard Hadlock, in an open letter to Wiley, Lee, have you ever wondered why so many… from road-tough musicians to jaded pub-crawlers, act like kids on Christmas when they hear you sing? (Wiley did wonder.) The eulogies could go on for pages, but the point is clear enough: Lee Wiley is a singer with a certain mystique.
The Wiley mystique was generated by both personal and professional circumstances, and further fed by some willful biographical manipulation by her musical associates, her record labels, and the artist herself. Nicknamed Pocahontas and characterized as regal by her friends, Wiley descended from the princess of a Cherokee tribe and from an English missionary who married an American parishioner... according to publicity material. Her birth date remains uncertain - initially given as 1915, then moved back to 1910, still more recently to 1908 - and revisionism has taken over the more sensational aspects of her biography (running away from home in the late 1920s, temporary blindness after a fall from a horse in the early 1930s, a near encounter with tuberculosis in the mid-1930s, etc,).
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