Peggy March

Her signature tune, "I Will Follow Him", is actually a cover song. It was composed by French conductors Franck Pourcel and Paul Mauriat, and first recorded as an instrumental by Pourcel under the title "Chariot", in 1961. The first vocal version was by Petula Clark, done in French. It was then translated into English and recorded by Miss March, and became a number one hit. In 1976, Pourcel's co-writer, Paul Mauriat, recorded a disco instrumental of the song, under the original "Chariot" title.

Margaret Battavio, aka Little Peggy March, had dreamt of a singing career for most of her young life, and had been winning talent contests as a young girl. She was signed to RCA in 1962 at age 14, and made her debut that year with a cover of the song "Little Me," taken from a Sid Caesar Broadway hit, which vanished without a trace.

Best known for her hit song "I Will Follow Him", which topped the American pop charts in April 1963; she was only 15 at the time, and was known as "Little Peggy March".

Recording for RCA Victor, March made 18 singles from 1964 to 1971. She also cut several albums, none of which sold well in the United States.

She won the Deutscher Schlager Contest in 1965 and her song "Mit 17 hat man noch Träume" ("At 17 you still have dreams") placed No. 2 in the German Singles Chart. This was followed by German songs like "In der Carnaby Street", "Einmal verliebt - immer verliebt", "Hey", "Romeo und Julia" ("On Carnaby Street, Once in Love-Always in Love, Hey, Romeo and Juliet"... No. 1 in German Charts).

March's success also came with financial trouble. She was a minor and the Coogan Law prevented her parents from managing her money. The responsibility was placed on her manager, Russell Smith. It was discovered in 1966 that he had squandered the fortune, leaving her with $500.

Moved to Germany with her husband in 1969 where she began a successful, multilingual recording/performing career.

Although she is sometimes remembered as a one-hit wonder, she continued to have success in Europe well into the 1970s.

In 1979, she experimented with disco on the album Electrifying, but it failed to achieve commercial success. By 1981 record companies did not renew her contracts, and she moved from Germany back to the United States.

In 1984, Jermaine Jackson and Pia Zadora achieved a major European hit single with the track "When the Rain Begins to Fall", co-written by March. Although not a hit in the UK or in the US, it went to #1 in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland. In 1998, the song entered the German Top 10 again when covered by rapper Pappa Bear.

The cult film Hairspray featured "I Wish I Were a Princess" in 1988, and a retro fad in Germany brought her some continuing success starting in the mid-1990s with the album Die Freiheit Frau zu sein (1995).

Her song "I Will Follow Him" was featured in the 1992 movie Sister Act.

In 2004 she was the headliner in Riff Markowitz's Fabulous Palm Springs Follies at the Plaza Theater in Palm Springs, California.

In March 2010, March went into the recording studio to record her first album of new, original material in English in over 30 years. A collaboration with Scandinavian songwriter and producer Soren Jensen, the album Always and Forever was released on October 13, 2010. It was followed by a special edition for the German-speaking countries in April 2012, including two duets with the Dutch singer José Hoebee, one of them being a cover version of "I Will Follow Him"; which had also been a #1 single in the Netherlands and Belgium for Hoebee in 1982 (March further recorded a subsequent recording in 2012 for a 2013 release to commemorate the song's 50th anniversary).