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Oscar-winning American pop lyricist Dorothy Fields was the first woman to be elected into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, in recognition of her long and successful career of hit songs, movie scores, and Broadway scores that spanned the late '20s through the early '70s. She was born on July 15, 1905, in Allenhurst, NJ, and grew up in a show business family: her father was Lew Fields, of the famed vaudevillian team Weber & Fields. Dorothy Fields' most highly regarded collaborative work was that done with composer Jimmy McHugh; they were a songwriting team from 1929 until 1935. Throughout the '30s, Fields worked the most on film music. In 1935 alone, she wrote for seven different movies, four of which were co-written with Jimmy McHugh, including Every Night at Eight and Hooray for Love. Her credits for musical theater include Hello Daddy (1929), Singin' the Blues (1931), Stars in Your Eyes (1939), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1951), Sweet Charity (1966), and See-Saw (1973). Fields also served as co-librettist with her brother, Herbert, for many Broadway shows, including Up in Central Park (1945), Arms and the Girl (1951), By the Beautiful Sea, and Redhead (1959), which won six Tony Awards. Fields most popular songs include "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" (1928), "On the Sunny Side of the Street" (1930), "I'm in the Mood for Love" (1935), and "The Way You Look Tonight," (1936) which garnered an Oscar. Besides McHugh, she also collaborated with a long list of esteemed pop composers, such as Jerome Kern, Fritz Kreisler, Sigmund Romberg, and more. Dorothy Fields died of a heart attack in N.Y.C. on March 28, 1974.
Wikipedia:
Dorothy Fields (July 15, 1905 – March 28, 1974) was an American librettist and lyricist.
She wrote over 400 songs for Broadway musicals and films. Along with Ann Ronell, Dana Suesse, Bernice Petkere, and Kay Swift, she was one of the first successful Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood female songwriters.
Biography
Fields was born in Allenhurst, New Jersey, and grew up in New York City.
Her father, Lew Fields, an immigrant from Poland, was a vaudeville comedian and later became a Broadway producer. Her career as a professional songwriter took off in 1928, when Jimmy McHugh, who had seen some of her early work, invited her to provide some lyrics for him for Blackbirds of 1928. Fields and McHugh teamed up until 1935. Songs from this period include "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby", "Exactly Like You", and "On the Sunny Side of the Street."
In the mid-1930s, Fields started to write lyrics for films and collaborated with other composers, including Jerome Kern. With Kern, she worked on the movie version of Roberta, and also on their greatest success, Swing Time. The song "The Way You Look Tonight" earned the Fields/Kern team an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1936.
Fields returned to New York and worked again on Broadway shows, but now as a librettist, first with Arthur Schwartz on Stars In Your Eyes. (They re-teamed in 1951 for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.) In the 1940s, she teamed up with her brother Herbert Fields, with whom she wrote the books for three Cole Porter shows, Let's Face It!, Something for the Boys, and Mexican Hayride. Together, they wrote the book for Annie Get Your Gun, a musical inspired by the life of Annie Oakley. They intended for Jerome Kern to write the music, but when he died, Irving Berlin was brought in. The show was a success, and ran for 1,147 performances.
In the 1950s, her biggest success was the show Redhead (1959), which won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. When she started collaborating with Cy Coleman in the 1960s, her career took a new turn. Their first work together was Sweet Charity. Her last hit was from their second collaboration in 1973, Seesaw. Its signature song was "It's Not Where You Start, It's Where You Finish". Fields died of a stroke the next year at the age of 68.
Fields was the sister of writers Herbert and Joseph.
Trivia
Thirty-five years after her death, Barack Obama, in his inauguration speech as 44th President of the United States on January 20, 2009, echoed lyrics by Fields when he said, "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America". This alludes to the song "Pick Yourself Up" from the 1936 film Swing Time, for which Jerome Kern had written the music, in which Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire sang Fields's words "Pick yourself up; dust yourself off; start all over again".
