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 Dorothy Fields was the first woman to break into the all-male club of American songwriters. |
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    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. 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 fifty 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." continue to page 2
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