Me and Dorothy Fields
Singer Suzanne Noble recounts her discovery of a long neglected female Broadway composer.
I grew up in New York, listening to ‘Great American Songbook’ music performed by artists like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Johnny Mathis, and Frank Sinatra. Some of my earliest memories were attending Broadway musicals with my grandmother, Fay. She got cut-price tickets, usually in the highest row of the theatre, from where I was lucky enough to see Carol Channing, Nanette Newman, Ben Vereen, Gwen Verdon and many other stars of the day.
I was familiar with South Pacific, Oklahoma, Tea for Two, and The Sound of Music. Also, with the most famous songwriting duos of that time – Rogers & Hammerstein, Rogers & Hart, Ira and George Gershwin, and Irving Berlin.
Dorothy Fields/Suzanne Noble
However, it wasn’t until I met Paul Maguire, a semi-retired pianist who had spent half a decade working as a composer arranger and pianist in the West End, that I discovered Dorothy Fields. We had just finished performing a show about the Dirty Blues, a genre of cheesy, sexy songs from the 1920s to the 1940s, when he suggested we do something new. “What about Dorothy Fields?” he asked.
I replied that I had never heard of her. “Look her up,” he said. “She was the lyricist behind I Can’t Give you Anything but Love, A Fine Romance, and Hey, Big Spender.
He had piqued my interest. That was in November 2021, and I embarked on a journey to uncover the background of this remarkable woman. I devoured biographies, listened to albums featuring her music and studied a dozen interviews with or about her.
I learned that over forty-eight years, Dorothy Fields wrote over four hundred songs and worked on more than twenty stage musicals and thirty movies, including Swingtime starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. She even teamed up with Jerome Kern to win an Oscar for the song The Way you Look Tonight. Despite a theatrical background (her father was one-half of Weber & Fields, the biggest vaudeville comedy duo of their day), she was initially dissuaded from going into the business. Through sheer persistence she found a way in, working with composers Jimmy McHugh, Jerome Kern, Arthur Schwartz and even Quincy Jones.
Returning to the theatre after a seven-year break when she was 60, she met Cy Coleman, who asked her to work on the show Sweet Charity. She wrote the song that most of us know by heart, Hey, Big Spender.
She had a remarkable career that spanned five decades, starting in the twenties and going right through to the seventies, outlasting many more famous contemporaries. At a time when most women were resigned to the kitchen, Dorothy worked on Broadway and in show business, carving a life for herself that was anything but traditional.
What started as a curiosity has led to my one-woman show, If They Could See Me Now: The Words and Music of Dorothy Fields, which I’ll be performing at the Kino-Teatr. The show features Fields’ most famous songs, along with lesser-known ones from the beginning of her career until her death, aged 69, in 1974. I hope this show will finally cement Dorothy’s name alongside all the others who have given us the Great American Songbook. It’s what she deserves and most certainly would have wanted.
• If They Could See Me Now: The Words and Music of Dorothy Fields is at Kino-Teatr, St Leonards on 11 November. www.kino-teatr.co.uk. Tickets from www.ticketsource.co.uk/kinoteatr/t-yaaxldy
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