Peggy's Blue Skylight is a Charles Mingus composition named after an exchange with Peggy Hitchcock in upstate New York, who wanted to replace her skylight with a blue plastic shield to create a perpetual blue sky. It was written on the piano at the Hitchcock Estate and first recorded in 1961 for the Mingus album Oh Yeah, released in 1962. The tune is a playful and expressive jazz piece that showcases Mingus's storytelling and improvisation, originally with Mingus on piano. A later 1973 Detroit performance features Mingus on bass with a quintet, and in 2018 BBE Music released the long-lost tapes from that set as part of the Jazz in Detroit Strata collection, highlighting the track's ongoing improvisational vitality.
