Around the time of his 90th birthday, the songwriter Jack Lawrence happened to attend a concert by Michael Feinstein, and was startled when the star pianist-singer singled him out and introduced him to the rest of the audience. He shouldn’t have been so surprised, Mr. Lawrence told me later. How many great lyricists and composers from the Golden Age of American popular song are not only still with us, but active and vital in their 10th decade? “I guess I am a phenomenon,” he conceded.

These days, it seems that Mr. Lawrence, now 93, and his music are more important than ever. The recent publication of his memoir, “They All Sang My Songs”(Barricade Books, with a forward by Mr. Feinstein), is merely the cap on a long series of events bringing the veteran composer and lyricist into the limelight. Most notably, Mr. Lawrence’s song “Beyond the Sea,” the French classic that he and the late Bobby Darin made into an American pop hit in 1960, is everywhere. It was heard in the blockbuster mega hit “Finding Nemo” and the flop “Beyond the Sea” (in both cases, performed by Darin wannabes). Jazz musicians and vocalists regularly include Mr. Lawrence’s “All or Nothing at All” in their sets, while “Tenderly,” “A Handful Of Stars,” and dozens of others are still done by singers everywhere. Thanks to his book, Mr. Lawrence himself is more visible: Tonight, he and I will discuss his career at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble at 67th Street.

Thanks to “Beyond the Sea,” Mr. Lawrence is known as a specialist in writing American lyrics to foreign compositions. He is, in fact, much more than that. Over the course of his career, he has written love songs, movie and show scores, swing and rhythm numbers, as well as lyrics for all sorts of tunes that had previously only existed as instrumentals (such as “Sleepy Lagoon” by the English classical composer Eric Coastes). He also is perhaps the only man, living or dead, to have collaborated with Oscar Levant, Carmen Lombardo, and Hoagy Carmichael – not to mention Cole Porter, which is especially notable, given that Porter wrote both words and music by himself.

Mr. Lawrence was born on April 7, 1912, the child of Russian immigrants; there’s a great story in his book about how his father inadvertently became the only Jewish Cossack in recorded history. Mr. Lawrence’s Brooklyn childhood was essentially a variation on “The Jazz Singer,” a story in which a first-generation American assimilates into the New World culture by means of popular music. His father said, “He’s too heavy for light work and too light for heavy work. Let him write songs!” Mr. Lawrence’s discovery at an early age that he was homosexual lends the story an unusual twist; such a revelation was not easily shared with one’s family in those days.

Mr. Lawrence’s first success as a songwriter came at the height of the Depression. “My collaborator was my school chum Arthur Altman,” Mr. Lawrence told me. “We both came from the same neighborhood and he was about a year older than I was but we got together, we were writing songs all through our teens.” They landed their first published song – and hit – when they connected with a violinist named Emery Deutsch. “We managed to play him our entire repertoire, and he said, ‘Well that’s not the kind of music I do – I’m known as a gypsy fiddle player. Call me if you ever get anything that’ll fit me.’ So we went home and I started thinking about a minor-key melody that Artie and I had. I came up with the song ‘Play, Fiddle, Play’ using that same melody. I scratched out a lyric and Artie and I cleaned it up and brushed it up and gave it to Emery. Well he was delirious with joy, he said, ‘That’s it, that’s it!’ “The song was a hit, but the young songwriter learned two hard facts about the music business: first, Deutsch insisted on the lion’s share of the credit and royalties for the song; second, the song became the target of a bogus plagiarism suit.

Following the success of “Play, Fiddle, Play,” Mr. Lawrence’s career gradually picked up steam. He would eventually get the call from Hollywood and later Broadway, but unfortunately, would never achieve the success he deserved writing full-length scores. His most significant film in this period was Republic Pictures’ “Manhattan Merry-Go-Round” (1937), otherwise notable as the movie debut of Joe DiMaggio. Mr. Lawrence’s specialty was the individual pop song, in which he could create a complete world unto itself and tell a cohesive story in 32 bars. In the late 1930s, he worked with the Russian born melodist Peter Tinturin, most notably on such hits and standards as “Foolin’ Myself” (associated with Billie Holiday and Lester Young) and “What Will I Tell My Heart” (Bing Crosby).

As the swing era gained momentum, so did Mr. Lawrence’s career, and he had an especially high track record of hits in the big-band era.

“In those days, you went around and got to meet the band leaders and their singers, and I was very friendly with Harry James, Sammy Kaye, Guy Lombardo, and the others. Once you got to know them, you could play your songs directly for them without having to go through a publisher.”

In 1939, Mr. Lawrence reunited with his first collaborator, Arthur Altman. “[The publisher] Lou Levy came to me and said that Arthur had this wonderful melody and that he’d like me to hear it. So I listened to it and it was the start of a very interesting song. I played around with it and I got this idea for the lyric ‘All or Nothing at All.’ I had to add notes and I changed the tune here and there. Arthur said that was okay.” Together, Altman and Mr. Lawrence wound up crafting a song with the very unusual length of 64 bars.

One of the song’s initial recordings was by a brand-new band, Harry James and His Orchestra, with a brand-new singer, Frank Sinatra. Their disc didn’t actually catch on until the World War II period, but nonetheless, it eventually became the Chairman of the Board’s first important recording. Following “All or Nothing at All” (which Sinatra commercially recorded again in 1961, 1966, and 1977), Mr. Lawrence became known as a composer who didn’t just create hits, but careers.

What “All or Nothing at All” did for Sinatra, “Yes, My Darling Daughter”(inspired by a traditional Yiddish melody) did for Dinah Shore and “If I Didn’t Care” did for the Ink Spots. Later, “Linda” (written in honor of the daughter of his lawyer, Phil Eastman, who later became Linda McCartney, wife of Paul and mother of Stella) helped Buddy Clark launch a solo career and “Tenderly” (written to a melody by pianist Walter Gross) helped Rosemary Clooney establish herself as a great ballad singer. Likewise, “Beyond the Sea,” utilizing Mr. Lawrence’s English lyric to a Charles Trenet chanson, gave Bobby Darin credibility as he made the transition from rock ‘n roll to grown-up pop.

Along the way, Mr. Lawrence was commissioned to write G-rated lyrics for Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” (with Porter’s approval), wrote songs for Mae West and the original vagabond gentile, Rudy Vallee, and led a band for the Coast Guard in which a young Nelson Riddle played trombone. He made two valiant attempts at creating a classic musical on Broadway, starting with “Courtin’ Time” (1937), in which director Alfred Drake, tough guy Lloyd Nolan, and doofus comic Joe E. Brown all played the leading role (George Balanchine choreographed). In 1964, he wrote the lyrics for “I Had a Ball,” a show fondly remembered by Broadway buffs (the cast album has been reissued by Decca Broadway), which co-starred two male leads, Richard Kiley and comic Buddy Hackett – the latter responsible for sabotaging the whole production.

Mr. Lawrence is, above all, a supreme craftsman, and these days, when craft is so often confused with shallow simplicity, that’s nothing to take for granted. Today Mr. Lawrence lives with his partner, Richard Debnam, in Redding, Conn. He reaps the benefits of a lifetime of good work, and so do all of us who love his words and music.