![]() Together they penned classics such as “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” (a song that Billie Holiday delivers with such panache) and “On The Sunny Side Of The Street.” Fields wrote speciality numbers for Cotton Club revues, many of which were later recorded by Duke Ellington in the 50s, she came into her own, writing for Broadway. Fields, who died in 1974, earned her first break co-writing with Jimmy McHugh. Though the majority of the top songwriters were men, Dorothy Fields was a female trailblazer. There was something about the early 20th Century – the Jazz Age of the 20s, the Great Depression, the melancholy wartime years – that conspired to create music that was truly uplifting and gloriously sentimental. They are characterized by deft and witty lyrics that evoke the very idea of high-society sophistication. The “standards” are as popular today as they were more than half a century ago the music simply transcends the era in which the songs were written. Creating the “standards” in the early 20th Century Listen to the best Great American Songbook songs on Spotify. The songs became the core repertoire of jazz musicians during this period, which stretched roughly from 1920 to 1960. It is not a real book, rather a term that applies to tunes of Broadway musical theatre, Hollywood movie musicals, and Tin Pan Alley ( the hub of songwriting that was the music publishers’ row on New York’s West 28th Street). ![]() They are just five masterpieces in a canon now widely known as The Great American Songbook. ![]() Songs such as “Summertime,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Let’s Face The Music And Dance,” and “Some Enchanted Evening” are so familiar they seem to be part of America’s cultural fabric.
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