This song is a reminder that sexual urges are universal and can sometimes be too hot to handle. The Fever in the song’s title is a euphemism for sexual desire. This is interesting to consider in relation to care homes, places where, even with residents of advanced ages, sexual urges do not simply disappear. As such, sexual behaviour can seem difficult to manage and transgressive. And for that reason, in practice, at least in the care home where I worked, sexual behaviour was quite carefully policed. Residents deemed to have over healthy sexual appetites, shall we say, or who were seen as sexually predatory, were ‘moved on’. The issue was particularly vexed around the question of relationships between residents, especially if one had dementia, and the other didn’t. In cases where one party had dementia, the care home would prohibit the relationship on the grounds that consent could not be inferred.
Peggy Lee’s song openly acknowledges the power of the Fever, its ability to cross racial and social barriers, exploding norms of propriety:
Captain Smith and Pocahontas
Had a very mad affair.
When her daddy tried to kill him,
She said, Daddy, oh, don’t you dare.
He gives me fever with his kisses,
Fever when he holds me tight.
Fever! I’m his missus.
Daddy, won’t you treat him right?
Ambiguously, the fever is presented as both deeply pleasurable, and a sickness. The speaker, in the throes of passion, becomes its prisoner (I’m his missus).
In the song, feeling the fever is about submitting yourself to an impersonal force, a larger reality, something inscribed in your DNA:
Never know how much I love you,
Never know how much I care.
When you put your arms around me
I get a fever that’s so hard to bear.
You give me fever when you kiss me,
Fever when you hold me tight.
Fever! in the mornin’,
Fever all through the night.
Sun lights up the daytime,
Moon lights up the night.
I light up when you call my name,
And you know I’m gonna treat you right.
Paradoxically, the speaker doesn’t know how much she cares for the Beloved until she feels physical contact, intimacy. It’s like lighting the blue touch paper: the resulting fire is uncontrollable. The parallelism of the you give me fever when + x structure in the chorus conveys a sense of the fever’s increasing intensity. The repetition of the word fever becomes hypnotic, and the words in between sort of blur.
Lee’s laconic delivery is inspired. It’s all about staying in and maintaining this really swinging groove. It feels talky, but it isn’t. There are little flickers and shifts of emphasis that are so subtle. When she sings fever just before in the morning (in the chorus), it’s a sudden ecstatic gasp. She deliberately avoids any move to a crescendo, just quietly moving around the beat. As a performance it’s a perfect illustration of the idea that less is more.
Peggy Lee’s version of the song is essentially a re-imagining of an earlier R & B version recorded by Little Willie John in 1956. Lee and her arrangers took the Little Willie John version and completely stripped it down to its component parts: drum, bass, finger clicks, plus sultry vocals. It’s like Lee heard the skeleton of the Little Willie John version and made that the main structure. She wanted it cool in a way that would talk to the Beat generation – so she used slang in the lyrics, eg, baby and chicks. Her humour can be seen in the ways she adds Early Modern English inflectional endings and pronouns to the Romeo and Juliet verse: When we kisseth, fever with thy flaming youth.
Ultimately the song is about desire itself, the way it can never be satisfied. Its real object is to reproduce itself. This is mesmerizingly embodied in the outro:
What a lovely way to burn
What a lovely way to burn
What a lovely way to burn
Just as fever cannot be doused in the song, so the same is true in life. Residents in care homes cannot, I think, just be told to park their desires, or to pretend they don’t exist. Care homes perhaps need to develop more adult, less embarrassed and more inclusive approaches to the Fever the song speaks of.
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