A Fine Romance

Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields wrote this for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to sing at each other in Swing Time in 1936, and Fields wrote it as a complaint rather than a courtship. The A Fine Romance chords here are the thirty-two bars in C at a bright 170, with the melody and a two-bar hold on CMaj7 at the end. The backing track follows this chart, so the tempo can be eased and the key moved to wherever a singer wants it.

Who wrote "A Fine Romance"

Music by Jerome Kern, words by Dorothy Fields, published in 1936 by Chappell and Company. It was written for the RKO picture Swing Time, where Astaire and Rogers introduced it together — the other song they took from that film, "The Way You Look Tonight", won the Academy Award that year. Astaire recorded it on his own for Brunswick on 28 July 1936 and the record led the charts for five weeks; Billie Holiday cut her version for Vocalion two months later, in September. It remains under copyright.

Recordings that made it a standard

• Fred Astaire, single (Brunswick, 1936) — the first hit version and the one closest to how the song was staged. Astaire sings it lightly, keeping the joke in the phrasing rather than pressing it.
• Billie Holiday and her Orchestra, single (Vocalion, 1936) — recorded within weeks of Astaire's. Holiday takes it as a swing number with a small band around her, which is how jazz musicians first came to play it.
• Count Basie and Joe Williams, The Greatest!! Count Basie Plays... (1956) — a big band reading with the rhythm section sitting back, and the model for taking the tune at a medium swing rather than a bounce.
• Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, Ella and Louis Again (1957) — the two voices trading it back and forth, which restores the duet the song was written as. The best-known version by a distance.
• Frank Sinatra, Ring-a-Ding-Ding! (1961) — Johnny Mandel's arrangement, fast and hard-swung, closer to the tempo on this chart than most.

The changes

Thirty-two bars in C, and not AABA: it is ABAC, the second half of the tune answering the first differently rather than returning to it. Two eight-bar A strains, identical, with a different eight bars after each. Then CMaj7 is held for two bars to close.

The A strain is built on a bass walking up by half steps, and the chords are there to carry it. C6, C#dim7, G7 over D, D#dim7 — the bass climbs C, C sharp, D, D sharp and arrives at E for Em7, and the two diminished chords are passing harmony on the way, not places the music goes. Em7, Am7, Dm7, G7 then walk the circle home. Read the first four bars as one long approach and they cause no trouble.

The B strain slides. C7 leans at F, then A13 and Ab13 drop by half steps into G13, and the same trick comes back three bars later with A7, F#13 and F13. These are parallel dominants moving chromatically, not functional changes: voice them alike and let them slip. The last four bars are a plain circle of fifths, E7 to A7 to D7 to G7, one of the cleanest in the repertoire and a good place to work on getting through four dominants in four bars.

The C strain is turnarounds, two chords to a bar almost throughout: C7 and A7, Dm7 and A7, Em7 and A7, Dm7 and G7b9. At 170 that is a chord every two beats, and the tune's difficulty is entirely there — not in any single chord but in the rate. Work the last eight bars slowly first.