Dorothy Fields: American Icon

“She was THE woman songwriter. The marvelous thing about the way Dorothy wrote is that her lyrics were inventive without being tricky. She could do it–but she never compromised her direct, fresh manner of expressing a thought.” – Betty Comden, foreword “On the Sunny Side of the Street: The Life and Lyrics of Dorothy Fields”

 

In the course of a remarkably long career, with successes from the 1920s all the way into the 1970s, Dorothy Fields wrote some of the most enduring lyrics of the golden age of the American popular song.

 

She was born into a show business family. Her father was Lew Fields, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, who found fame as one half of Weber and Fields vaudeville act, one of the most popular comedy teams at the end of the Nineteenth. After the breakup of Weber and Fields, Lew Fields went on to become one of the most important theater producers of his day. Between 1904 and 1916, he produced some 40 Broadway shows, and was called “The King of Musical Comedy”. So when Dorothy Fields was born on July 15, 1905 in Allenhurst, New Jersey, one would think she had the ideal connections for the career she dreamed of as an actress. However, her father disapproved of acting and did everything he could to make that career impossible for her.

Fields worked with numerous other composers, most notably Jerome Kern. In 1935, for the film version of Roberta, she and McHugh wrote a new lyric for a song Kern had composed with Oscar Hammerstein II a year earlier. The song became the classic “I Won’t Dance”. She and Kern turned out a magnificent score for the wonderful Fred Astaire film Swingtime (1936), a score that included “A Fine Romance”, “Pick Yourself Up”, “Waltz in Swing Time”, and the Academy-award winning “The Way You Look Tonight”. Songwriters Hall of Fame