Dorothy Fields was part of a famous theatrical family- her father was the comedian and producer Lew Fields and her brother Herbert wrote the book for many of the famous Rodgers and Hart musicals. Dorothy Fields was best known as a lyricist, one of the few women who played a central role in the
great period of American popular song from 1920 to 1960. She also wrote the book for several Broadway musicals, the most famous being Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun.
Dorothy Fields first became prominent writing the lyrics for Cotton Club shows in Harlem in the late 1920s and
1930s, which included such songs as "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby," and "On the Sunny Side of the Street." Her most successful collaboration was with the great songwriter Jerome Kern on three 1930s films, including the incomparable Swing Time with Rogers and Astaire, which produced such
classic songs as "The Way You Look Tonight" and "A Fine Romance." Fields also collaborated with such prominent composers as Sigmund Romberg, Fritz Kreisler, Harold Arlen, Burton Lane, Arthur Schwartz, and Cy Coleman. Her lyrics were colloquial and urbane, sometimes slangy and sometimes sensuous.
Her role as a music creator in a world dominated by men makes a fascinating and unusual story- with particular interest for woman today. Greenspan further discusses Fields in relation to other women songwriters and lyricists of the time.
1. The World of Her Father
2. The World of Her Family
3. The Teen Years
4. Marriage and Start of Career
5. What's Black and White and Heard All Over
6. Give My Refrains to Broadway
7. Hello to Hollywood
8. Change Partners and Write
9. The Best of Hollywood
10.
End of an Era
11. Hollywood Through a Broadway Lens
12. Librettos Instead of Lyrics
13. Up In Central Park
14. Annie Get Your Gun
15. More Movies
16. The American Colonies and Brooklyn
17. Something Old, Something New
18. Sweet Charity
19. It's Where you
Finish
Appendix 1: List of Songs
Appendix 2: List of Theater Works and Movies
Endnotes
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Charlotte Greenspan is a musicologist and pianist with a special interest in the interaction of words and music in genres as diverse as Renaissance chansons, nineteenth-century Italian opera, and American popular music. She wrote the entries on opera in the New Harvard Dictionary of Music and
has contributed biographical articles to Jewish Women in America and Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. She has also written extensively on music and film. She lives in Ithaca, New York with her husband, Jerrold Meinwald.
