"Pick Yourself Up" is a song composed by Jerome Kern with lyrics by Dorothy Fields, written for the 1936 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film Swing Time. In the film, Astaire's character feigns having two left feet in order to take a dance lesson from Rogers, singing the self-deprecating verse before she responds with the buoyant chorus. The song's structure is distinctive: a 32-bar AA'BA chorus in which the A' section is an exact melodic and harmonic transposition of the opening A section up a major second, an unusual device in the Great American Songbook that propels the melody upward with mounting energy. The bridge continues this upward motion, climbing by semitones through new tonal centers via I-IV-V7-I progressions. Kern and Fields designed the melody and lyrics to mirror the song's theme of resilience, with phrases that dip low on images of failure before rising on harmonic lifts toward optimism. Fred Astaire recorded the original version with Johnny Green and His Orchestra for the Brunswick label in 1936, and the song quickly became a widely performed standard. Frank Sinatra brought it into the swing era with arrangements by Neal Hefti that featured jazz-inflected orchestral breaks, while Nat King Cole offered his own vocal jazz interpretation. Performers typically sing only the chorus, often omitting both the introductory verse and a lesser-known third contrasting section. The song has endured as one of the most recognizable entries in the Kern-Fields catalog, celebrated for its ingenious ascending architecture and its enduring message of perseverance.
