This week on the show, my spotlight is on one of the most prolific lyricists in the American Songbook— Dorothy Fields. From the 1920s through the 1970s, Fields worked alongside some notable composers to pen over 400 songs, establishing herself as the foremost female songwriter of her generation. This hour, we’ll explore her work with composers like Jerome Kern, Jimmy McHugh, and Cy Coleman, and sample from her songbook, which includes treasures like “Pick Yourself Up” and “They Way You Look Tonight.”
Fields and McHugh
Dorothy Fields was born in New Jersey in 1905, the daughter of notable vaudeville comedian Lew Fields. Although her father didn’t want his children to follow him into the family business, the young Dorothy caught the show business bug young, and began to sing, play piano, and write songs when she was studying at the Benjamin School for Girls in New York City. She never attended college, but instead started writing poetry and performing in New York as a singer in review shows. She sang in one review in 1920 that featured songs written by Rodgers and Hart (she even dated Richard Rodgers briefly when they were young).
It was composer J. Fred Coots who recognized Fields’ talent, encouraging her to go into songwriting, and introducing her to her first musical partner: Jimmy McHugh.
McHugh asked Fields to help him write lyrics for songs he was composing for Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, a storied all-white venue which featured some of the most notable African-American performers at the time. After finding success at the Cotton Club, the two went on to write the music for their first big hit, the African-American musical Blackbirds Of 1928, which produced several notable hit songs, including “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and “I Must Have That Man.”
An interesting side note, while McHugh and Fields are officially credited with “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”, composers Andy Razaf and Fats Waller have also claimed to have written it. Given how often Black artists were marginalized, their claim does have some credibility.
After Blackbirds of 1928, Dorothy Field and Jimmy McHugh became in demand as songwriters as the 1930s began. Their next significant hits came with the Lew Leslie musical International Revue from 1930. Although the musical was a flop, it did produce two memorable songs: the perennial pick-me-up “On The Sunny Side of The Street” and the song “Exactly Like You.”
After their success on Broadway in the late 1920s, Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, along with many Broadway composers of their day, traveled west to contribute their talents to Hollywood. The two became reliable songwriters for many MGM musicals in the 1930s, including Dancing Lady, Every Night At Eight, You’re An Angel, and Hooray For Love, producing more memorable songs like “I’m In The Mood For Love.”
Fields and Kern
Around 1934, Dorothy Fields began to work with other composers out in Hollywood, notably a fellow East Coaster who had made his way out there too, Jerome Kern. Kern’s 1933 hit musical Roberta was being made into a film, and Kern tasked Fields to help him write a new song for the film, as well as adapt some of the older songs he had previously written with lyricist Otto Harbach. The new number was the song “Lovely To Look At,” which earned Fields an Academy Award nomination for Best Song in 1935. Roberta also produced the song “I Won’t Dance,” a song that originally was featured in an earlier musical written by Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, and Otto Harbach. Dorothy Fields helped punch up the lyrics, so all four of those songwriters are credited on the song (as well as Jimmy McHugh, who received a co-writing credit for all the songs in Roberta, despite little evidence that he had much to do with them).
Kern and Fields collaborated for only a brief stretch in the mid 1930s, writing songs for several film musicals. And although their time together was brief, many of the best songs from both of their catalogs come from these few years. Their biggest success came in 1936 on the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film Swing Time, which in addition to producing dazzling dance sequences, created several hit songs like “The Way You Look Tonight,” “Pick Yourself Up,” and “A Fine Romance.” “The Way You Look Tonight” even won the Academy Award for Best Song in 1936.
Some of Fields' greatest turns of phrase are in these particular songs. I love especially some of the imagery in “A Fine Romance” like: “You're calmer than the seals In the Arctic Ocean. At least they flap their fins to express emotion.” Or some of the nuanced rhymes in “The Way You Look Tonight,” like rhyming “awfully low” with “feel a glow” or “smile so warm” with “nothing for me.” It’s delicate and careful in its craft, but natural in its delivery.
Fields and Schwartz
After a brief but successful partnership with Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields changed the path of her career slightly. In the 1940s, she and her brother Herbert Fields wrote the books to several notable musicals, including Mexican Hayride by Cole Porter and Annie Get Your Gun by Irving Berlin, although they didn’t contribute any songs.
She did continue writing songs, mostly in the late 40s and early 1950s, working with several composers, including Sigmund Romberg, Morton Gould, and most notably Arthur Schwartz. While her songs with Schwartz may not be as memorable as those with Jerome Kern or Jimmy McHugh, a few like “Make The Man Love Me” from the 1951 musical A Tree Grows In Brooklyn have been recorded over the years by other artists like Dinah Washington.
Fields and Coleman
Not many songwriters can claim to have made significant contributions to the American songbook both in the 1920s AND in the 1960s, but Dorothy Fields was not just any songwriter. In 1966, Fields (now in her 60s) teamed up with composer Cy Coleman (still in his 30s) to write the songs for the new musical Sweet Charity starring Gwen Verdon. The musical was a smash hit, and earned Fields and Coleman a Tony nomination. She and Coleman collaborated again in 1973 for her 19th and final Broadway production Two For The Seesaw. She died in her home the following year at age 69.