Fine and Dandy
The Life and Work of Kay Swift
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- $64.99
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- $64.99
Publisher Description
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 theater, 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 Informed by rich material, including Swift’s unpublished memoirs and extensive interviews with her family members and friends, this book captures the essence and spirit of a remarkable woman.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kay Swift (1897 1993) lived a glorious life as a pianist and composer, companion to George Gershwin and the first woman to write a Broadway musical, Fine and Dandy. Ohl, who teaches piano at Heidelberg College in Ohio, provides an exhaustive, sometimes dense first biography of the composer. Using Swift's unpublished memoirs and interviews with her grandchildren, Ohl chronicles the pianist's breathless and charmed life, from her precocious childhood as a musical prodigy who was memorizing lyrics from operas at five years old, to her marriage to banker James Warburg and her later years of composing for Balanchine ballets and shows for Radio City Music Hall. Swift flitted through the show business world of the 1920s, '30s and '40s, and Ohl recreates this heady time in musical theater. Ohl engages in a close reading of Swift's Fine and Dandy, helping to bring the Broadway show first produced in 1930 back to our attention. As Ohl demonstrates, Swift found herself as a part of a society in which women's worth was perceived through their husband's success. Yet Swift's publications secured her membership in the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, joining the company of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers and George Gershwin. While Ohl's academic tone slows her narrative at times, she deserves credit for bringing Swift back to our attention and for producing what surely will be the definitive biography of this fascinating woman.