Kay Swift

Kay Swift is better known for her decade-long involvement with George Gershwin than she is for her own musical contributions to the American Songbook. After George's death, she was sought after far more as an expert on his work than for her own original musical compositions. Though many people believe that she made this choice, she had a great deal of regret that her career was always second to his, and much as she wished for work, she never had few of the kind of opportunities that would have resulted in a bigger catalog bearing her name. Gershwin dedicated his "Songbook" to her. He suggested that her maiden name, Swift, with the nickname "Kay," which originated with him, would be the perfect name for her as a songwriter. Trained as a classical musician, with a great deal of talent both as a performer and as a composer, she only began to write popular show tunes with his encouragement. In 1930, Kay and her husband James Paul Warburg (of the banking Warburgs) wrote the first successful musical show of the 1930s, Fine and Dandy (with a book by Donald Ogden Stewart) starring Joe Cook. (Warburg wrote under the name "Paul James" so that his father's banking associates wouldn't become alarmed.) This song was preceded by many revue songs, including "Can't We Be Friends?" from the 1929 Schwartz-Dietz revue The Little Show. Her musical and personal relationship with George Gershwin was so significant that her handwritten comments and notation can be found on pages of the original manuscript to Porgy and Bess. For ten years she and George were intimate, and it is certain, after some frustrations in Hollywood, he was about to return to her in New York before his untimely death in 1937. After George's death, she completed many of George's works (from memory) and wrote down complete works that otherwise would have been lost. Her second Broadway score (words and music) was for Cornelia Otis Skinner's one-woman show Paris '90. Even into her 90s, Swift was the last knowledgeable living person who could play Gershwin music the way George played it. Her apartment in Manhattan was the ultimate destination for Gershwin scholars. She was a consultant for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Let 'Em Eat Cake production in 1983 and also for the recordings of conductor and Gershwin scholar Michael Tilson Thomas.