• Preface


• A Note About the Lyrics


• Chapter One: The World of Her Father


• Chapter Two: The World of Her Family


• Chapter Three: The Teen Years


• Chapter Four: Marriage and the Start of a Career


• Chapter Five: What's Black and White and Heard All Over?


• Chapter Six: Give My Refrains to Broadway


• Chapter Seven: Hello to Hollywood


• Chapter Eight: Change Partners and Write


• Chapter Nine: The Best of Hollywood


• Chapter Ten: End of an Era


• Chapter Eleven: Hollywood Through a Broadway Lens


• Chapter Twelve: Librettos Instead of Lyrics


• Chapter Thirteen: Up In Central Park


• Chapter Fourteen: Annie Get Your Gun


• Chapter Fifteen: More Movies


• Chapter Sixteen: Colonial America and Brooklyn


• Chapter Seventeen: Something Old, Something New


• Chapter Eighteen: Sweet Charity


• Chapter Nineteen: "It's Where You Finish"


• Appendix One: List of Songs


• Appendix Two: List of Theatre Works and Movies


• Notes

Charlotte Greenspan is a musicologist and pianist who has written extensively on music and film. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

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.