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This chapter presents composer Kay Swift's opinion about George Gershwin. It explains that in addition to their romantic relationship, Swift and Gershwin enjoyed camaraderie as creative artists. Swift believed that Gershwin resembled his music and he always looked taller that his actual height because he was slim, long-legged, and fast-moving. She described her experience in scoring for Gershwin's Preludes for Piano and Porgy and Bess and in studying composition with Joseph Schillinger.

This chapter focuses on the obsession of Kay Swift's family with George Gershwin. It explains that knowing Gershwin and his music was a source of pride for Swift and his daughter Andrea and that her granddaughter, author Katharine Weber, shared the family fascination for Gershwin's music. The ritual of listening to Gershwin created a secret bond between three generations of Swift women. This chapter also compares the family and professional background of Gershwin and James Warburg.

This chapter focuses on the changes in the life of Kay Swift after she moved to New York City with her husband James Warburg. It explains that Swift re-enrolled in the Institute of Musical Art and decided to pursue the private activities of composition and performance instead of teaching piano. It also discusses the transformation in Swift's career and how the highbrow culture of classical music, ballet, and literature became tainted with the lowbrow thrills of Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, and Harlem. This chapter also mentions Swift's decision to join the Musician's Union.

This chapter considers Kay Swift's work for the American Ballet of New York and the Radio City Music Hall. It explains that after Fine and Dandy, Swift became inactive because her collaboration and her relationship with her husband collapsed after he was appointed financial adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt. It also discusses Swift's divorce, her relationship with composer George Gershwin, and her collaboration with him in the opera Porgy and Bess.

This chapter provides background information on Kay Swift's family and childhood. It explains that the Swift family originated in the British Isles but had lived in America for several generations and that music was an important component in the lives of the Swift children. Swift was raised by serious amateur and professional musicians. This chapter also discusses Swift's education, values and her music lessons.

This chapter examines the personal and professional decisions made by Kay Swift after her father's death in July 1914. It explains that Swift taught lessons in piano and dance to help the family and discusses her education at the Institute of Musical Art and her marriage to James Paul Warburg. It also describes Swift's training under violinist and composer Charles Martin Loeffler.

This chapter describes the success of Kay Swift's musical Fine and Dandy, which opened on September 23, 1930 at Erlanger's Theater. It explains that the musical was a collaboration between Swift and her husband who was using the penname Paul James and that it was the first Broadway musical whose score was written entirely by a woman. It provides a synopsis and describes the songs featured in the musical. This chapter also considers Swift's membership in the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in 1931.

After the Gershwins completed A Damsel in Distress, they started work in mid-May on the picture The Goldwyn Follies for Samuel Goldwyn, which had its world premiere in Miami on January 28, 1938. The critics generally liked the nearly two-hour film, especially the elegant “Water Nymph Ballet” and the impudent Charlie McCarthy. Gershwin's music figured mostly in tangential ways, but he nevertheless enjoyed a posthumous triumph with his score to the film. Aside from “Dawn of a New Day,” Ira initially left the song file and other unpublished sketches alone, turning to Kay Swift for assistance to fashion a score from Gershwin's notebooks and other manuscripts. In any event, the Gershwin songs arranged and versified after George's death largely consist of secondhand efforts, and they remain in essence footnotes to a glorious career.

This chapter chronicles the first public performances by dancers from the School of American Ballet in 1934. Although these performances have been construed as previews prior to the company’s official debut in 1935, both were important milestones in the life of the organization. The June 1934 performance at Woodlands, the family estate of Edward Warburg, was a somewhat makeshift affair and revealed the haphazard management of the enterprise. It offered not only the first public performances of Serenade but revised versions of two of Balanchine’s existing ballets, Dreams and Mozartiana. A second more public engagement in Hartford in December 1934 witnessed the premieres of two additional works, Transcendence and the collegiate satire Alma Mater (with a score by Kay Swift). These early offerings of the American Ballet met with mixed reactions and criticism as they were not geared to a wide audience and were not overtly American in character.

In 1932, Random House published George Gershwin's Song-Book, which was dedicated to Kay Swift. It contained eighteen songs: “Swanee,” “Nobody but You,” “Stairway to Paradise,” “Do It Again,” “Fascinating Rhythm,” “Oh, Lady, Be Good!,” “Somebody Loves Me,” “Sweet and Low-Down,” “That Certain Feeling,” “The Man I Love,” “Clap Yo' Hands,” “Do, Do, Do,” “My One and Only,” “'S Wonderful,” “Strike Up the Band,” “Liza,” “I Got Rhythm,” and “Who Cares?” This chapter on Gershwin's Song-Book considers some of the wide uses of the Gershwin songbook on record, on film, and in theaters.