(Although she was a singer, her singing voice was dubbed in the movie).
She mostly plays acoustic guitar but she's certainly no folk singer; her songs are far too pop-influenced.
A great American popular singer, her wit, sensuality, intelligence and expressive minimalism bridged the worlds of swing and jazz.
The New Yorker's Whitney Balliett called Peggy Lee "a stripped-note singer... her vibrato spare and her volume low".
That CD opened at No. 10 with 24,000 in sales, giving the British soul singer her fourth Top 10 album.
Set in Chicago in 1927, the play centres on a verbally abusive blues singer, her fellow black musicians, and their white manager.
Abigail is a punchy singer, her loud, sharp voice cleaving through everything around her: Lily's smoky simplicity, their neatly picked guitar work.
"Ms. Previn is no great singer, her guitar playing is only adequate, and her melodies sometimes have an uncomfortable tendency to move in too-familiar directions," he wrote.
A song from the soundtrack, Last Dance, was another big hit and won the singer her first Grammy.
She was a kind of art singer, her art being that of the Broadway musical at its most deliciously rowdy.
She was born to a musical family in Riga, her mother being a lieder singer, her father a choral director.
