Has the New York Times Always Been Feeding US Nonsense?

Too bad Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields didn't write more songs together. These are some of the best for all time. m/r

The Way You Look Tonight: Sinatra Song of the Century #31 :: SteynOnline

by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields
Steyn's Song of the Week Extra  May 15, 2015

... I wonder if, back in 1936, Fred Astaire, who introduced more great songs to the world than any other performer, knew that he was premiering not just a pop hit, not just an enduring standard, but one of the handful of iconic songs that represent the absolute heights of the American Songbook. Fred's original record still sounds pretty good almost eight decades later: The arranger and conductor was Johnny Green, a man of many accomplishments and sufficiently serious about the later ones that he changed his billing to "John Green". Among other distinctions, he's the composer of "Body And Soul", one of the greatest popular compositions of the century. Yet, as he told me not long before he died, "I'm very proud of the recordings I made with Fred Astaire." They made Astaire not just a Broadway and Hollywood dance man but a force on records, too.

Fred introduced the song serenading Ginger Rogers in the 1936 picture Swing Time, the danciest of Astaire and Rogers' RKO musicals and with a wonderful score by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. By the mid-1930s, Kern, composer of Show Boat and much else, was the dean of American songwriters. Richard Rodgers used to say that he had one foot in the old world and one in the new. That's to say, Kern wrote gorgeous ballads, and in his days with P G Wodehouse fun comedy numbers, but he had no great interest in swing, and his occasional forays into more vernacular forms can sound faintly condescending: "Can't Help Lovin' That Man Of Mine" bears the marking "Tempo di blues". But, teamed with the younger Dorothy Fields (you can read more about her in Mark Steyn's American Songbook), Kern turned in one of his best ever scores. The plot of Swing Time is genial hokum: Astaire plays a chap who turns up so late for his own wedding that his father-in-law-to-be tells him to push off and not come back until he's earned 25 grand. Looking for an easy way to solve his financial woes, Fred runs into a dance instructress, played by guess who. Complications ensue, but so does song and dance. Astaire and Rogers always got the best songwriters – Irving Berlin, the Gershwins – and Kern and Fields more than held their own. In fact, you could make the case that it's the best of all Fred-and-Ginger scores, notwithstanding the objections of the New York Times reviewer:

Right now we could not even whistle a bar of 'A Fine Romance', and that's about the catchiest and brightest melody in the show. The others... are merely adequate or worse. Neither good Kern or good swing.

Among the "merely adequate or worse" numbers was not only "The Way You Look Tonight" but "Pick Yourself Up". "Dorothy wrote so many good songs with Jerry," James Hammerstein, Oscar's son, once said to me. "Some of the funnier ones - 'A Fine Romance', 'Bojangles Of Harlem', that whole score is marvelous. 'Pick Yourself Up' is one of his better 'up' tunes." Of the seven songs in the film, Astaire made pop records of five of them, and all were big sellers.

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