Fine and Dandy: The Life and Work of Kay Swift

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Kay Swift (1897-1993) was one of the few women composers active on Broadway in the first half of the twentieth century. Best known as George Gershwin's assistant, musical adviser, and intimate friend, Swift was in fact an accomplished musician herself, a pianist and composer whose Fine and Dandy (1930) was the first complete Broadway musical written by a woman. This fascinating book - the first biography of Swift - discusses her music and her extraordinary life. Vicki Ohl describes Swift's work for musical theatre, the ballet, Radio City Music Hall's Rockettes, and commercial shows. She also tells how Swift served as director of light music for the 1939 World's Fair, eloped with a cowboy from the rodeo at the fair, and abandoned her native New York for Oregon, later fashioning her experiences into an autobiographical novel, Who Could Ask for Anything More? Informed by rich material, including Swift's unpublished memoirs and extensive interviews with her family members and friends, this book captures the essence and spirit of a remarkable woman.

Fine and Dandy: The Life and Work of Kay Swift Review

Kay Swift has been a nebulous figure for generations, best remembered as a married woman who had a long affair with George Gershwin. This affair has never been discussed in much detail in anything I've read. After Gershwin's early death, Swift destroyed all his letters to her and asked Ira Gershwin to burn her letters to his brother. Very little documentation of this relationship exists. Swift was Gershwin's social Pygmalion as well as his assistant, his teacher and his lover. Born to artistic parents who held responsible positions in society, Swift was a music student when she met and married banker James Warburg. Unlike most women of the era, Swift was intent on a musical career in addition to her marriage and three children (whom she mostly ignored until they were mothers themselves). With money and connections, Swift worked her way into the Broadway mainstream, beginning as pit musician and rehearsal pianist, then Geshwin's assistant, and then composer of the hit Broadway musical, FINE AND DANDY. She divorced the wealthy Warburg in order to make herself available to Gershwin (who had other girlfriends besides Swift). The proposal never came. Supposedly Oscar Levant quipped, "Look. There goes George Gershwin and the future Miss Kay Swift." While she always claimed that her being a woman made no difference in her success or lack of it, it seems to me that having a connection to the Warburg money certainly did make a difference, though. Although she was not yet forty, her life jumped the track when she divorced Warburg. She did marry twice more (once to a cowboy), compose music for Radio City Music Hall and three World's Fairs, write a best-selling novel that became a film, she nonetheless wasn't a "contender" any more. There's a big difference between being a Broadway composer and being a RICH Broadway composer.

This book has 238 pages of actual text, but it seemed more like 500 because of all the unnecessary and boring details. The book does not go into the important personal events like the marriages and divorces, but is chock-full of detailed verbal descriptions of obscure musical compositions. Example: "Both Swift's and Debussy's mazurkas feature a three-sharp key signature suggesting F sharp minor, although harmonies wander through unrelated keys and hit at fleeting tonal areas. Both use mostly triadic harmonies and seventh cords yet abandon strict functional harmony. Debussy uses half cadences and plagal cadences to avoid finality until the one authentic cadence at the end. Swift's cadences are more evasive. They feature traditional linear approaches to tonic in the melody, while the waltz bass confounds convention, moving to the tonic by third or tritone. Her chords often progress by intervals of a third or move in parallel motion by step, featuring planes of dominant seventh chords in an impressionistic style. Fluctuations from major to minor occur in several places." There are pages and pages like this. There are also detailed synopses of Swift's shows and other compositions. Other pages appear to be rehashes of the programs at late life tributes. I didn't read this book to find out which singers-nobody-ever-heard-of performed which forgotten song from an unproduced show at Merkin Hall in 1986. I appreciate the small bit of useful information contained in this book, but I resent having to wade through all the minutiae to get to it.

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