The scholar Warren Vache Sr. has written a very useful volume of composer biographies, which he calls “The Unsung Songwriters.” It includes data on nearly every songwriter except the very familiar big six: Gershwin, Kern, Rodgers, Arlen, Porter, and Berlin. Both Dorothy Fields and her most important collaborator, Jimmy McHugh, are in it. But I can’t believe Fields will possibly qualify as “unsung” once this, her centennial year, comes to a close.

Fields is hardly unsung, for instance, compared to the equally worthy McHugh (1894-1969). There are whole Fields songbook albums (most notably Barbara Cook’s essential “Close as Pages in a Book”), as well as a fine biography (“On the Sunny Side of the Street,” by Deborah Grace Winer). This year there have been all manner of tribute concerts and cabaret shows – no one was waiting for her actual birthday, which comes this Friday.

One reason there’s been so much celebrating is that there’s so much of her to go around. There were really three Dorothy Fieldses: Hollywood, Broadway, and jazz. Although she wrote for films as early as 1929, the mid-1930s are most conveniently described as her Hollywood period. She worked frequently with Jerome Kern (the Kern songs heard most often today are the ones with her lyrics: “I Won’t Dance,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “A Fine Romance”). Even her major Broadway show of the era, the 1939 “Stars on Your Eyes,” was a Hollywood farce.

From the end of World War II until her death in 1974, Fields’s career was reborn on Broadway. Rodgers and Hammerstein had created a new kind of show in which the work of the songwriter took center stage. Fields was not only one of the few veteran lyricists to master the new Broadway, she was virtually the only prominent writer from the 1920s still crafting meaningful new music 50 years later.

Yet it was during her early career, from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, that Fields may have made her most vital contribution to American music. The daughter of a New York Jewish theatrical dynasty (father Lew Fields was a pioneering vaudevillian and producer), she teamed with Tin Pan Alley’s most notable Irishman, McHugh, who already had a direct connection to jazz and black show business.

Almost from their very first song, Fields and McHugh were championed by the era’s two key white impresarios of black talent: Producer Lew Leslie, who put together snappy revues using both black and white casts, and Irving Mills, the publisher and band agent who apparently liked McHugh so much he didn’t put his own name on his songs (as he did with Duke Ellington).

Fields came late to the jazz age – only a year or so before Black Friday heralded the end of an era – but her songs were immediately played both in shows and by the major bands of the era: Ellington, Ben Pollack’s band with Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden, Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang, and especially Louis Armstrong. Within two years, the team created three classic songs – “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” from “Blackbirds of 1928” and “Exactly Like You” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street” from “The International Revue” – that virtually invented the idea of the jazz standard all by themselves.

Jazz musicians and singers began playing these songs and, unlike most songs of the era, never stopped. These three tunes became, along with Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” and the everlovin’ blues, instant fodder for jam sessions, a common language which all musicians spoke and continue to speak. (The songs were so widely accepted by jazzmen that a rumor, almost certainly untrue, persisted for years that McHugh actually bought the melodies from Fats Waller.)

Armstrong was perhaps the biggest supporter of the Fields & McHugh big three. He returned to them over and over again, in many different guises: When he first began recording with big-band backing in 1929, “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” was among his earliest recordings in the orchestral format (it survives in two takes). There’s also a very early “Exactly Like You.” By including them in his “Musical Autobiography” of 1957, he made it clear he regarded all three as important career pegs.

Oddly, Armstrong didn’t record “Sunny Side” when it was brand new (it should have been on the flip of “Exactly Like You”), though he played and sang it nearly every chance he got. It’s on both of his earliest surviving broadcasts: from Sweden in 1933, and in an extended five-minute version with Victor Young’s Orchestra in 1935. It also shows up on many other performances, including a radio jam session with Jack Teagarden and Fats Waller in 1938, and with the Newport International Jazz Band in 1958.

In one version, from the Bing Crosby radio show in 1951, the host makes an aside about how Armstrong has made the composer of the melody “very happy.” But then he adds, “I don’t know about the guy who wrote the words.”

Forgetting for a second that the author was hardly a “guy,” I can only imagine that Fields danced with glee. Her song was perhaps the greatest vehicle ever for Armstrong’s natural effusive effervescence and his illuminative radiance. More than anyone, Dorothy Fields knew that any side of the street that Louis Armstrong happened to be on was automatically the sunny side.

A Mind For Metaphors

There’s a take of “A Fine Romance” by Billie Holiday in which Holiday stumbles across an unfamiliar phrase in the line “We just fizz like parts of a seidlitz powder.” Even as early as 1955, this particular substance was no longer on anybody’s lips (in a manner of speaking). Some contemporary listeners might have the same problem with “For heaven rest us / We’re not asbestos,” from “I Won’t Dance.” You have to know that asbestos was regarded as a flame-retardant wonder before it turned out to not be so wonderful.

Yet both are prime examples of the brilliance of Dorothy Fields, who wrote them. Like many of her best couplets, it’s at once specific to its era and timeless; despite the obscurity of some of these references, her meaning never seems less than clear. The speaker in “A Fine Romance” sees the romance fizzling, the one in “I Won’t Dance” doesn’t want to give it a chance to start sizzling. No one but Fields would have thought of either metaphor, but they both work wonderfully.

Many of Fields’s greatest songs deal with our powerlessness when in love. In “Lost in a Fog,” she employs a specific atmospheric condition as a symbol of the haze love puts us in. She takes it a step further in “Don’t Blame Me,” demonstrating that love is stronger than we, and that no jury would convict us for failing to resist it. In “Remind Me,” she pleads: “Remind me not to find you so attractive” – in other words, if I think about you just the teensiest bit, I’m a goner.