Dorothy Fields, Jerome Kern, & George Gershwin

George Gershwin (/ˈɡɜːrʃ.wɪn/; born Jacob Bruskin Gershowitz, September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist] whose compositions spanned both popular and classical genres. Among his best-known works are the orchestral compositions Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928), the songs "Swanee" (1919) and "Fascinating Rhythm" (1924), the jazz standard "I Got Rhythm" (1930), and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935) which spawned the hit "Summertime". Gershwin studied piano under Charles Hambitzer and composition with Rubin Goldmark, Henry Cowell, and Joseph Brody. He began his career as a song plugger but soon started composing Broadway theater works with his brother Ira Gershwin and with Buddy DeSylva. He moved to Paris intending to study with Nadia Boulanger, but she refused him. He subsequently composed An American in Paris, returned to New York City and wrote Porgy and Bess with Ira and DuBose Heyward. Initially a commercial failure, it came to be considered one of the most important American operas of the twentieth century and an American cultural classic. Gershwin moved to Hollywood and composed numerous film scores. He died in 1937 of a malignant brain tumor. His compositions have been adapted for use in film and television, with several becoming jazz standards recorded and covered in many variations. Gershwin was of Russian-Jewish and Lithuanian-Jewish ancestry. His grandfather, Jakov Gershowitz, was born in Odessa and had served for 25 years as a mechanic for the Imperial Russian Army to earn the right of free travel and residence as a Jew; finally retiring near Saint Petersburg. His teenage son, Moishe Gershowitz, worked as a leather cutter for women's shoes. Moishe Gershowitz met and fell in love with Roza Bruskina, the teenage daughter of a furrier in Vilnius. She and her family moved to New York because of increasing anti-Jewish sentiment in Russia, changing her first name to Rose. Moishe, faced with compulsory military service if he remained in Russia, moved to America as soon as he could afford to. Once in New York, he changed his first name to Morris. Gershowitz lived with a maternal uncle in Brooklyn, working as a foreman in a women's shoe factory. He married Rose on July 21, 1895, and Gershowitz soon Americanized his name to Gershwine. Their first child, Ira Gershwin, was born on December 6, 1896, after which the family moved into a second-floor apartment on Brooklyn's Snediker Avenue. On September 26, 1898, George was born as second son to Morris and Rose Bruskin Gershwin in their second-floor apartment at 242 Snediker Avenue in Brooklyn. His birth certificate identifies him as Jacob Gershwin, with the surname pronounced 'Gersh-vin' in the Russian and Yiddish immigrant community. He had just one given name, contrary to the American practice of giving children both a first and a middle name. He was named after his grandfather, the army mechanic. He soon became known as George, and changed the spelling of his surname to 'Gershwin' around the time he became a professional musician; other family members followed suit.[8] After Ira and George, another boy, Arthur Gershwin (1900–1981), and a girl, Frances Gershwin (1906–1999), were born into the family. The family lived in many different residences, as their father changed dwellings with each new enterprise in which he became involved. They grew up mostly in the Yiddish Theater District. George and Ira frequented the local Yiddish theaters, with George occasionally appearing onstage as an extra. George lived a boyhood not unusual in New York tenements, which included running around with his friends, roller-skating and misbehaving in the streets. Until 1908, he cared nothing about music. Then as a ten-year-old, he was intrigued upon hearing his friend Maxie Rosenzweig's violin recital. The sound, and the way his friend played, captivated him. At about the same time, George's parents had bought a piano for his older brother Ira. To his parents' surprise, though, and to Ira's relief, it was George who spent more time playing it as he continued to enjoy it. Although his younger sister Frances was the first in the family to make a living through her musical talents, she married young and devoted herself to being a mother and housewife, thus precluding spending any serious time on musical endeavors. Having given up her performing career, she settled upon painting as a creative outlet, which had also been a hobby George briefly pursued. Arthur Gershwin followed in the paths of George and Ira, also becoming a composer of songs, musicals, and short piano works. With a degree of frustration, George tried various piano teachers for about two years (circa 1911) before finally being introduced to Charles Hambitzer by Jack Miller (circa 1913), the pianist in the Beethoven Symphony Orchestra. Until his death in 1918, Hambitzer remained Gershwin's musical mentor, taught him conventional piano technique, introduced him to music of the European classical tradition, and encouraged him to attend orchestral concerts. Tin Pan Alley and Broadway, 1913–1923 Swanee Al Jolson's hit 1920 recording of George Gershwin and Irving Caesar's 1919 "Swanee". Problems playing this file? See media help. In 1913, Gershwin left school at the age of 15 and found his first job as a "song plugger". His employer was Jerome H. Remick and Company, a Detroit-based publishing firm with a branch office on New York City's Tin Pan Alley, and he earned $15 a week. His first published song was "When You Want 'Em, You Can't Get 'Em, When You've Got 'Em, You Don't Want 'Em" in 1916 when Gershwin was only 17 years old. It earned him 50 cents. In 1916, Gershwin started working for Aeolian Company and Standard Music Rolls in New York, recording and arranging. He produced dozens, if not hundreds, of rolls under his own and assumed names (pseudonyms attributed to Gershwin include Fred Murtha and Bert Wynn). He also recorded rolls of his own compositions for the Duo-Art and Welte-Mignon reproducing pianos. As well as recording piano rolls, Gershwin made a brief foray into vaudeville, accompanying both Nora Bayes and Louise Dresser on the piano.[16] His 1917 novelty ragtime, "Rialto Ripples", was a commercial success. In 1919 he scored his first big national hit with his song "Swanee," with words by Irving Caesar. Al Jolson, a famous Broadway singer of the day, heard Gershwin perform "Swanee" at a party and decided to sing it in one of his shows.

Dorothy Fields Fields, Dorothy (July 15, 1905 – Mar. 28, 1974), lyricist and librettist, was born in Allenhurst, N.J., the daughter of Lew M. Fields and Rose Harris. Her father, born Lewis Maurice Schoenfeld, was famous as a member of the comedy duo Weber and Fields, but left performing in the year of Dorothy’s birth to become a successful Broadway impressario. Although Lew Fields cautioned his children against pursuing careers in the theater, Dorothy’s two older brothers, Joseph and Herbert, also became successful on Broadway, the former as a writer and producer, and the latter as a writer and Dorothy’s sometime collaborator. Dorothy Fields graduated in 1923 from the Benjamin Franklin School for Girls in New York City, where she excelled at English, drama, and basketball, and had her poems published in the school’s literary magazine. After her father quashed her attempt to land an acting job with a stock company in Yonkers, she worked as a teacher and laboratory assistant, while continuing to submit her verses to magazines. DOROTHY FIELDS Born: July 15, 1905 Died: March 28, 1974 Key Shows "Annie Get Your Gun" "Blackbirds of 1928" "Redhead" "Sugar Babies" "Sweet Charity" "Up in Central Park" Related Artists Harold Arlen Fred and Adele Astaire Irving Berlin Bob Fosse Oscar Hammerstein II Jerome Kern Ethel Merman Cole Porter Richard Rodgers Gwen Verdon In 1926 Fields met the popular song composer J. Fred Coots, who suggested that they write some songs together. Although nothing memorable came out of this brief association, Coots introduced Fields to another composer and song-plugger, Jimmy McHugh. Through McHugh she got a job as a lyricist at Mills Music, Inc., where one of her first assignments was to write the lyric for a tune commemorating aviator Ruth Elder’s attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Fields later referred to herself as “Mills Music’s fifty-dollars-a-night girl,” because she was paid 50 dollars for each lyric she composed. In 1927 Fields received sole billing as lyricist for a revue at Harlem’s Cotton Club that featured Duke Ellington and his Orchestra. The following year she and McHugh wrote the song “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” which was dropped from the revue “Revels of 1928,” but found a home alongside another soon-to-be-popular Fields-McHugh number, “Diga Diga Doo,” in the all-black hit, Lew Leslie’s “Blackbirds of 1928.” After this initial success, the Fields-McHugh team collaborated on “International Revue” (1930), a flop despite two enduring songs, “Exactly Like You” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” The family of jazz pianist Thomas (“Fats”) Waller maintained that Waller, not McHugh, actually composed the melodies to “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” and others, and sold them to McHugh for a nominal fee. In any case, however, it is undisputed that Fields is the lyricist. From 1930 to 1939 Fields worked in Hollywood, first with McHugh, with whom she wrote songs such as “I’m in the Mood for Love” and “Dinner at Eight” for the movie musicals LOVE IN THE ROUGH (1930) and EVERY NIGHT AT EIGHT (1935), and then with Jerome Kern. Kern and Fields first worked together on ROBERTA in 1935, and subsequent collaborations included I DREAM TOO MUCH (1935), SWING TIME (1936), and JOY OF LIVING (1938). In 1936, Kern and Fields won the Academy Award for Best Song for “The Way You Look Tonight,” from SWING TIME. Other Kern-Fields songs from this period that have gone on to become standards include “Lovely to Look At” and “A Fine Romance.” Jerome Kern and Fields collaborated on songs for movie musicals during the 1930s. On July 15, 1939, Fields married David Eli Lahm, a clothing manufacturer. They had two children before his death in 1958. The same year, she returned to New York to work with composer Arthur Schwartz on the musical “Stars in Your Eyes.” She then collaborated with her brother Herbert, with whom she had already worked on screenplays and the short-lived musical “Hello Daddy” (1928), and on the books for three Cole Porter hits: “Let’s Face It” (1941), “Something for the Boys” (1943), and “Mexican Hayride” (1944). In 1945 Dorothy and Herbert Fields wrote the book for Sigmund Romberg’s “Up in Central Park.” Her lyrics for the show included “Close as Pages in a Book.” In 1946, Fields approached Oscar Hammerstein with her idea for a musical based on the life of sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Hammerstein agreed to produce the show, and Kern and Fields were contracted to write the songs. When Kern died before they were able to begin work on the project, Irving Berlin was hired to replace him. Berlin wrote both music and lyrics for “Annie Get Your Gun,” but Dorothy and Herbert Fields contributed an excellent book. The finished product, starring Ethel Merman as Annie, ran 1,147 performances. It remains one of the most popular shows in the repertoire. In 1927 Fields received sole billing as lyricist for a revue at Harlem’s Cotton Club. Fields’ work habits were highly disciplined. Typically, she would spend eight weeks researching, discussing, and making notes on a project, before settling into an 8:30 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. daily work routine. She worked at a bridge table in her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and preferred to write with pencil on a yellow legal pad. She kept notebooks in which she copied passages from Dryden, Shaw, and Thoreau; unusual synonyms for commonly used words; humorous proverbs; rhyming phrases; odd-sounding words; and anything else that might come in handy in writing a lyric. Tall, slender, and well dressed, with chestnut hair and hazel eyes, she spoke well and was active in charitable causes throughout her life. Fields collaborated with her brother and composer Morton Gould on the lackluster “Arms and the Girl” in 1950. The following year, she wrote several fine lyrics to Arthur Schwartz’s melodies for “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” She scored two films with composer Harold Arlen, MR. IMPERIUM (1951) and THE FARMER TAKES A WIFE (1953), then returned to Broadway to work with Schwartz again on “By the Beautiful Sea” (1954). Herbert Fields died in 1959, while “Redhead,” the show they were working on with composer Albert Hague, was having its out-of-town tryout. Although not a great show, “Redhead” captured the Tony Award for Best Musical in a lean year for Broadway theater. Her penultimate musical, “Sweet Charity,” written with composer Cy Coleman and librettist Neil Simon, was the biggest hit of the 1965-1966 season. Songs such as “Big Spender” and “If My Friends Could See Me Now” proved that Fields, despite her advancing age, had not lost her knack for up-to-the-minute slang and phraseology. In 1971, Fields became the first woman inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Her last show, “Two for the Seesaw” (1973), also written with Coleman, was not a popular success, but her lyrics were praised for their evocation of modern life in New York. She died at home in New York City. During her 48-year career Fields cowrote more than 400 songs and worked on 15 musicals and at least 26 movies. Her lyrics were noted for their strong characterization, clarity of language, and middlebrow humor. An amateur pianist and lifelong lover of classical music, she was highly conscious of the melodic line, and tailored her lyrics to float freely over it. Fields’ professional longevity, rare for a songwriter in the popular field, may be attributed to her undimming imagination and her willingness to adapt to changing trends in the musical theater.

First compositions For a time, Kern worked as a rehearsal pianist in Broadway theatres and as a song-plugger for Tin Pan Alley music publishers. While in London, he secured a contract from the American impresario Charles Frohman to provide songs for interpolation in Broadway versions of London shows. He began to provide these additions in 1904 to British scores for An English Daisy, by Seymour Hicks and Walter Slaughter, and Mr. Wix of Wickham, for which he wrote most of the songs. Angela Lansbury sings "How'd you like to spoon with me?" in Till the Clouds Roll By (1946) In 1905, Kern contributed the song "How'd you like to spoon with me?" to Ivan Caryll's hit musical The Earl and the Girl when the show transferred to Chicago and New York in 1905. He also contributed to the New York production of The Catch of the Season (1905), The Little Cherub (1906) and The Orchid (1907), among other shows. From 1905 on, he spent long periods of time in London, contributing songs to West End shows like The Beauty of Bath (1906; with lyricist P. G. Wodehouse) and making valuable contacts, including George Grossmith Jr. and Seymour Hicks, who were the first to introduce Kern's songs to the London stage. In 1909 during one of his stays in England, Kern took a boat trip on the River Thames with some friends, and when the boat stopped at Walton-on-Thames, they went to an inn called the Swan for a drink. Kern was much taken with the proprietor's daughter, Eva Leale (1891–1959), who was working behind the bar. He wooed her, and they were married at the Anglican church of St. Mary's in Walton on October 25, 1910. The couple then lived at the Swan when Kern was in England. In May 1915, Kern was due to sail with Charles Frohman from New York to London on board the RMS Lusitania, but Kern missed the boat, having overslept after staying up late playing poker. Frohman died in the sinking of the ship. The "Princess Theatre shows" were unique on Broadway not only for their small size, but their clever, coherent plots, integrated scores and naturalistic acting, which presented "a sharp contrast to the large-scale Ruritanian operettas then in vogue" or the star-studded revues and extravaganzas of producers like Florenz Ziegfeld. Earlier musical comedy had often been thinly plotted, gaudy pieces, marked by the insertion of songs into their scores with little regard to the plot. But Kern and Bolton followed the examples of Gilbert and Sullivan and French opéra bouffe in integrating song and story. "These shows built and polished the mold from which almost all later major musical comedies evolved. ... The characters and situations were, within the limitations of musical comedy license, believable and the humor came from the situations or the nature of the characters. Kern's exquisitely flowing melodies were employed to further the action or develop characterization." The shows featured modern American settings and simple scene changes to suit the small theatre. The "Princess Theatre shows" were unique on Broadway not only for their small size, but their clever, coherent plots, integrated scores and naturalistic acting, which presented "a sharp contrast to the large-scale Ruritanian operettas then in vogue"[3] or the star-studded revues and extravaganzas of producers like Florenz Ziegfeld. Earlier musical comedy had often been thinly plotted, gaudy pieces, marked by the insertion of songs into their scores with little regard to the plot. But Kern and Bolton followed the examples of Gilbert and Sullivan and French opéra bouffe in integrating song and story. "These shows built and polished the mold from which almost all later major musical comedies evolved. ... The characters and situations were, within the limitations of musical comedy license, believable and the humor came from the situations or the nature of the characters. Kern's exquisitely flowing melodies were employed to further the action or develop characterization."] The shows featured modern American settings and simple scene changes to suit the small theatre. The "Mind-the-Paint" Girl (1912 play; starring Billie Burke) – incidental music The Red Petticoat (1912) – Kern's first complete score To-Night's the Night (1914) – contributor of two songs to this Rubens musical The Girl from Utah (1914) – added five songs to the American production of this Rubens musical Nobody Home (1915) – the first "Princess Theatre show" Very Good Eddie (1915; revived in 1975) Ziegfeld Follies of 1916 (1916; a revue; the first of many) – contributed four songs Theodore & Co (1916) – contributed four songs to young Ivor Novello's London hit. Miss 1917 - the musical comedy Miss Springtime (1917) – contributor of two songs to this Emmerich Kalman success Have a Heart (1917) – composer and contributor of some lyrics[62] Love O' Mike (1917) Oh, Boy! (1917) – the most successful Princess Theatre show Ziegfeld Follies of 1917 (1917) – contributor of "Because You Are Just You (Just Because You're You)" Leave It to Jane (1917; revived in 1958 Off-Broadway) Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918) – the last Princess Theatre hit "Oh, My Dear" (1918) – contributed one song to this last "Princess Theatre show" The Night Boat (1920) Hitchy-Koo of 1920 (1920) – revue Sally (1920; revived in 1923 and 1948) – one of Kern's biggest hits The Cabaret Girl (London 1922) The Bunch and Judy (1922) – Kern's first show with Fred Astaire Stepping Stones (1923) During the last phase of his theatrical composing career, Kern continued to work with his previous collaborators but also met Oscar Hammerstein II and Otto Harbach, with whom Kern wrote his most lasting, memorable, and well-known works. The most successful of these are as follows: