Fine & dandy : the life and work of Kay Swift /

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 Using Swift's unpublished memoirs and interviews with her grandchildren, Ohl chronicles the pianist's breathless and charmed life, from her precocious childhood as a musical prodigy who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. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Katharine ("Kay") Swift is well known to those familiar with American popular music during the first half of the 20th century, but she is usually refracted through the lens of George Gershwin, her lover and collaborator. In this first full-length biography, Ohl (theory & piano, Heidelberg Coll.) presents Swift as an accomplished composer in her own right, the first woman to pen a complete Broadway musical (Fine and Dandy, 1930). Swift enjoyed a nearly idyllic childhood that included an extensive music background, including attendance at the precursor of New York's Juilliard School. Throughout her life, she composed in a variety of styles and for various media. Married to banker James Warburg, she led a wild existence during the Roaring Twenties, was intimately involved with Gershwin and frequently mentioned as his possible wife after her divorce from Warburg, married a rancher in the West (which led to her autobiographical novel, Who Could Ask for Anything More?, later made into the movie Never a Dull Moment), and composed music for corporate America in the 1960s. Drawing on Swift's personal papers and original interviews with friends, family, and colleagues, Ohl has written a thorough and readable account of an important and pioneering American composer. For all libraries.-Bruce R. Schueneman, Texas A&M Univ. Lib., Kingsville (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.