Pick Yourself Up: Dorothy Fields and the American Musical

Famed lyricist Dorothy Fields penned the words to more than four hundred songs, among them mega-hits such as On the Sunny Side of the Street,
I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,
and The Way You Look Tonight.
In Pick Yourself Up, Charlotte Greenspan offers the most complete treatment of Fields’s life and work to date, tracing her rise to prominence in a male-dominated world. Born in 1904 into a show business family–her father, Lou Fields, was a famed stage comedian turned Broadway producer–Fields first teamed with songwriter Jimmy McHugh in the late 1920s and went on to a series of Hollywood collaborations with Jerome Kern, including the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers classic Swing Time. With her brother Herbert, she co-authored the books for several of Cole Porter’s shows and for Irving Berlin’s classic Annie Get Your Gun. Fields’s lyrics–colloquial, urbane, sometimes slangy, sometimes sensuous–won her high praise from later generations of songwriters including Stephen Sondheim, and her stellar career opened a path for other women in her profession, among them Betty Comden and Dory Previn.