Songs She Wrote

January 6, 2025
Historian Garber (My Melancholy Baby) pulls back the curtain on female songwriters who helped shape American music in this well-meaning if sometimes flat survey. Beginning in the 1920s during the “glory period of the Great American Songbook,” he spotlights lyricist Dorothy Donnelly, who teamed up with the Shubert brothers to adapt European standards into American productions like the 1924 operetta The Student Prince (which featured the love ballad “Serenade”); Ruth Lowe, whose 1939 song “I'll Never Smile Again” was inspired by her husband’s sudden death and became one of Frank Sinatra's early hits; and Sylvia Dee, who copyrighted nearly 200 songs during her 28-year career. Dorothy Fields, among the most “elite” songwriters of the first half of the 20th century, churned out hits like 1936’s “The Way You Look Tonight” despite sinking into alcoholism late in her career, before making a comeback when she teamed up with Cly Coleman for the 1966 Broadway production Sweet Charity. Garber does an admirable job of resurrecting the legacies of women who often went underrecognized in favor of their male collaborators or were otherwise shut out of the music industry, though readers may be frustrated by his tendency to omit key details (for example, he mentions that Fields “unexpectedly” died in 1974 during a day of casting for the musical Seesaw, but fails to elaborate on the cause of her death). Still, this has its moments.

February 1, 2025
Before Motown and Stax, there was Tin Pan Alley. A collection of music publishers in New York City that thrived from the late 1800s through to the Great Depression, the Alley was where the bulk of what would come to be known as the Great American Songbook was written. Garber highlights women like Mabel Wayne and Maria Grever, whose names are not widely known or cited, but who penned many of the songs that got America singing. The depth of research on display is especially impressive given how little information exists on many of the subjects, who were either erased by male cowriters or were writing under pen names. Garber not only gives voice to these pioneering women, his close reading of the songs and their musical impact make this book unique in its breadth, acting as both a studied appreciation of the songs the women created and the incredible impact they made in a male-dominated field. Exhaustive and authoritative, Songs She Wrote is an overdue celebration of the women behind the music.

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