Pick Yourself Up

<p>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.</p>