Johnny Mercer

For other people named John Mercer, see John Mercer (disambiguation).

Johnny Mercer

John Herndon "Johnny" Mercer (November 18, 1909 – June 25, 1976) was a popular American songwriter and singer. As a songwriter, he worked mainly as a lyricist but wrote his own music. He was also a popular singer who recorded his own songs as well as songs written by others. From the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, many of the songs he wrote and performed were among the most popular hits. He wrote the lyrics to more than 1000 songs, including songs for movies and Broadway shows and received nineteen Academy Award nominations. He also was a cofounder of Capitol Records.

Childhood

Johnny Mercer was born in Savannah, Georgia to George Armstrong Mercer, prominent attorney and real estate developer, and Lillian Ciucevich, George Mercer’s secretary and then second wife, the daughter of Croatian-Irish migrants who came to America in the 1850s and whose father was a merchant-seaman who ran the Union blockade during the American Civil War. Mercer was the fourth son, first by Lillian. His great-grandfather was Confederate General Hugh Weedon Mercer and he was a direct descendant of Revolutionary War General Hugh Mercer, a Scottish soldier-physician who died at the Battle of Princeton. Mercer was also a distant cousin of General George S. Patton. The Mercer House in Savannah was built by General Hugh Weedon Mercer in 1860, later the home of Jim Williams, whose trial for murder was the centerpiece of John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, although neither the General nor Johnny ever lived there.

Mercer liked music as a small child and attributed his musical talent to his mother, who would sing sentimental ballads, though his father would also sing, mostly old Scottish songs. His aunt told him he was humming music when he was six-months old and later she took him to see minstrel and vaudeville shows where he heard “coon songs” and ragtime.The family’s summer home “Vernon View” was on the tidal waters and Mercer’s long summers there among mossy trees, saltwater marshes, and soft, starry nights inspired him years later.

Mercer’s exposure to Black music was perhaps unique among the white songwriters of his generation as he had African-American playmates and servants, and he listened to the fishermen and vendors about him, who spoke and sang in the Creole dialect known as “Geechee”. He was also attracted to Black church services. Mercer later stated, “Songs always fascinated me more than anything”. He never had formal musical training but was singing in a choir by six and by the time he was eleven or twelve he had memorized almost all of the songs he had heard and he had became curious about who had written them. He once asked his brother who the best songwriters were, and his brother said Irving Berlin, among the best of Tin Pan Alley.

Despite his early exposure to music, Mercer’s talent was clearly on creating the words and singing, not playing music, though early on he thought he would become a composer rather than a lyricist. In addition to the lyrics he memorized, he was an avid reader and wrote adventure stories. His attempts to play the trumpet and piano were not successful, however, and he never could read musical scores with any facility, relying instead on his own notational system.

As a teenager in the Jazz Era, he was a ”product of his age”. He hunted for records in the Black section of Savannah and played such early Black jazz greats as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong. His father owned the first car in town, and Mercer’s teenage social life was enhanced by his driving privilege, which sometimes verged on recklessness. The family would motor to the mountains near Asheville, North Carolina to escape the Savannah heat and there Mercer learned to dance (from Arthur Murray himself) and to flirt with Southern belles, his natural sense of rhythm helping him on both accounts.

Mercer attended Woodberry Forest boys prep school until 1927. Though not a top student, he was active in literary and poetry societies and as a humor writer for the school’s publications. In addition, his exposure to classic literature augmented his already rich store of vocabulary and phraseology. He started to scribble down ingenious, sometimes strained rhymed phrases for later use. Mercer was also the class clown and a prankster, and member of the “hop” committee was booked musical entertainment on campus.

Already somewhat of a musical authority on jazz, his yearbook stated, “No orchestra or new production can be authoritatively termed ‘good’ until Johnny’s stamp of approval has been placed upon it. His ability to ‘get hot’ under all conditions and at all times is uncanny”. Mercer began to write songs, an early effort being ‘’Sister Susie, Strut Your Stuff.” and quickly learned the powerful effect songs had on girls.

Given his family’s proud history and association with Princeton, New Jersey and Princeton University, Mercer was destined for school there but his father’s financial setbacks in the late 1920’s change those plans. He began to work in his father’s recovering business, collecting rent and running errands, but soon get bored with the routine and with Savannah, and looked to escape.

Starting out

Template:Sample box end Mercer moved to New York in 1928, when he was 19. His first few jobs were as an actor but he soon gravitated toward singing and lyric writing. His first lyric appeared in a musical revue in 1930. Later, after appearing in two motion pictures, he quit acting altogether to concentrate on writing and performing songs exclusively.

This was the golden age of the sophisticated popular song, like those of Cole Porter. Songs were put into revues without much regard for integrating the song into the plot. During the 1930s there was a shift in musical theatre from musical revues to musicals that used the song to further the plot. There was less of a demand for the pure stand-alone song. In the early 1930s, when Mercer was offered a job in Hollywood to write songs and act in low-budget musicals for RKO, he took it.

Hollywood years

It was only when Mercer moved to Hollywood in 1935 that his career was assured. His first big song "I'm an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande" was used by Bing Crosby in a film, and from there his demand as a lyricist took off. He found himself writing more and performing less.

In 1941 Mercer met an ideal musical collaborator in the form of Harold Arlen whose compositions mixed with jazz and blues provided Mercer's sophisticated, slangy lyrics a perfect musical vehicle. Now his lyrics began to display the combination of sophisticated wit and southern regional vernacular that characterize some of his best songs. Their first hit was "Blues in the Night" (1941). They went on to compose "That Old Black Magic" (1942), "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" (1941), "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive" (1944), and "Come Rain Or Come Shine" (1946) among others.

In Hollywood he was able to collaborate with a remarkable number of composers, including Richard Whiting, Harry Warren, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Jimmy Van Heusen, Henry Mancini, Dorothy Fields, and Hoagy Carmichael. He was adaptable in his style, listening carefully and absorbing a tune and then transforming it into his own style. He said he preferred to have the music first, taking it home and working on it. He claimed composers had no problem with this method as long as he came back with the lyrics.

Mercer cofounded Capitol Records in Hollywood in 1942 along with businessman Buddy DeSylva and record store owner Glen Wallichs.

After the death of his friend and collaborator, Paul Whiting, he began working with Harry Warren, one of the best composers in the film business. Starting in the late 1930s, Mercer also had an immensely productive collaborative relationship with Harold Arlen.

Mercer was often asked to write new lyrics to already popular tunes. The lyrics to "Laura," "Midnight Sun," and "Satin Doll" were all written after the melodies had become hits. He was also asked to write English lyrics to foreign songs, the most famous example being "Autumn Leaves," based on the French "Les Feuilles Mortes."

Occasionally, Mercer wrote both music and lyrics. "Something's Gotta Give" is probably the best-known song in this category.

Mercer wrote for some MGM films, which include Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and Merry Andrew (1958). He wrote the lyrics to "Moon River" for Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. (Henry Mancini wrote the music.) In 1969, Mercer helped publishers Abe Olman and Howie Richmond found the National Academy of Popular Music's Songwriters Hall of Fame.

A good indication of the high esteem in which Mercer was held can be seen in the fact that, in 1964, he became the only lyricist to have his work recorded as a volume of Ella Fitzgerald's celebrated 'Songbook' albums for the Verve label. Yet Mercer always remained humble about his work, attributing much to luck and timing. He was fond of telling the story of how he was offered the job of doing the lyrics for Johnny Mandel's music on The Sandpiper, only to have the producer turn his lyrics down. The producer offered the commission to Paul Francis Webster and the result was "The Shadow of Your Smile" which became a huge hit, winning the 1965 Oscar for Best Original Song.

Broadway credits

Mercer wrote the lyrics for songs heard in the revues Garrick Gaieties (1930) and Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939 and for the musicals St. Louis Woman (1946), Top Banana (musical) (1951), Li'l Abner (1956), Saratoga (1959), and Foxy (1964).

Southern roots

Born in the South, Mercer grew up listening to records of Tin Pan Alley songs but also to so-called "race" records, marketed to blacks. His later songs merged his southern roots with his urban knowledge of sophisticated songwriters. It was his southern roots that enable him to be one of the few lyricists able to skillfully write lyrics set to the jazz melodies of composers such as Hoagy Carmichael. For years Mercer had to ignore those roots to fit the requirements of Tin Pan Alley standard terms. "Moon River", with its remarkable phrase "my huckleberry friend" would never have been accepted in the Tin Pan Alley years.

Singing style

Well-regarded also as a singer, with a folksy singing quality, he was a natural for his own songs such as "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive", "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe", "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)", and "Lazybones." He was considered a first-rate performer of his own work.

It has been said that he penned "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)", one of the great torch laments of all times, on a napkin while sitting at the bar at P. J. Clarke's when Tommy Joyce was the bartender. The next day he called Tommy to apologize for the line "So, set 'em up, Joe," "I couldn't get your name to rhyme." Mercer, like Cole Porter before him, was more interested in the words than the emotion in lyric. This may be why "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" was sung more effectively by him than other singers who often turned it into a tear-jerker.

ATCO Records issued Two Of A Kind in 1961, a duet album by Bobby Darin and Johnny Mercer with Billy May and his Orchestra, produced by Ahmet Ertegün.

In 1971 Mercer presented a retrospective of his career for the "Lyrics and Lyricists Series" in New York City. Including an omnibus of his "greatest hits" and a performance by Margaret Whiting, it was recorded live as An Evening with Johnny Mercer.

In 1974, Mercer recorded two albums of his songs in London, with the Pete Moore Orchestra, and with the Harry Roche Constellation.

Posthumous success

In his last year, Mercer became extremely fond of pop singer Barry Manilow, in part because Manilow's first hit record was of a song titled "Mandy", which was also the name of Mercer's daughter Amanda. After Mercer's death, his widow, Ginger Mehan Mercer, arranged to give some unfinished lyrics he had written to Manilow to possibly develop into complete songs. Among these was a piece titled "When October Goes", a melancholy remembrance of lost love. Manilow applied his own melody to the lyric and issued it as a single in 1984, when it became a top 10 Adult Contemporary hit in the United States. The song has since become a jazz standard, with notable recordings by Rosemary Clooney, Nancy Wilson, and Megon McDonough, among other performers.

Academy Awards

Mercer won four Academy Awards for Best Song:

• "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe" (1946) (music by Harry Warren) for The Harvey Girls
• "In The Cool, Cool, Cool Of The Evening" (1951) (music by Hoagy Carmichael) for Here Comes The Groom
• "Moon River" (1961) (music by Henry Mancini) for Breakfast at Tiffany's
• "Days of Wine and Roses" (1962) (music by Henry Mancini) for Days of Wine and Roses

Songs

Lyrics by Mercer, unless noted.

He wrote many other songs, some of which have entered the Great American Songbook:

• "Lazybones" (1933) (music by Hoagy Carmichael)
• "P.S. I Love You" (1934) (music by Gordon Jenkins)
• "Goody Goody" (1936) (music by Matty Maineck)
• "I'm an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande" (1936)
• "Hooray for Hollywood" (1937) (music by Richard A. Whiting)
• "Too Marvelous for Words" (1937) (music by Richard A. Whiting)
• "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" (1938) (music by Harry Warren)
• "Jeepers Creepers" (1938) (music by Harry Warren)
• "And The Angels Sing" (1939) (music by Ziggy Elman)
• "Day In, Day Out" (1939) (music by Rube Bloom)
• "Fools Rush In" (1940) (music by Rube Bloom)
• "Blues In The Night" (1941) (music by Harold Arlen)
• "I Remember You" (1941) (music by Victor Schertzinger)
• "Tangerine" (1941) (music by Victor Schertzinger)
• "This Time the Dream's on Me" (1941) (music by Harold Arlen)
• "Hit The Road To Dreamland" (1942) (music by Harold Arlen)
• "That Old Black Magic" (1942) (music by Harold Arlen)
• "Skylark" (1942) (music by Hoagy Carmichael)
• "Dearly Beloved" (1942) (music by Jerome Kern)
• "I'm Old Fashioned" (1943) (music by Jerome Kern)
• "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" (1943) (music by Harold Arlen)
• "Dream" (1943) (words and music by Johnny Mercer)
• "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive" (1944) (music by Harold Arlen)
• "Out of This World" (1945) (music by Harold Arlen)
• "Laura" (1945) (music by David Raksin)
• "Trav'lin' Light" (1946) (music by Jimmy Mundy and James Osborne "Trummy" Young)
• "Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home" (1946) (music by Harold Arlen)
• "Come Rain Or Come Shine" (1946) (music by Harold Arlen)
• "Autumn Leaves" (1947) (music by Joseph Kosma)
• "Glow Worm" (1952) (music Paul Lincke)
• "Satin Doll" (1953) (music by Duke Ellington)
• "Something's Gotta Give" (1954) (words and music by Johnny Mercer)
• "Moon River" (1961) (music by Henry Mancini)
• "Days of Wine and Roses" (1962) (music by Henry Mancini)
• "Charade" (1963) (music by Henry Mancini)
• "Lorna" (1964) {music by Mort Lindsey)
• "Midnight Sun" (music by Lionel Hampton and Sonny Burke)
• "Summer Wind" (1965) (music by Henry Mayer)
• "Drinking Again" (with Doris Tauber)
• "When October Goes" (music by Barry Manilow)

Other facts

• He was honored by the United States Postal Service with his portrait placed on a stamp in 1996.
• His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1628 Vine Street is a block away from the Capitol Records building at 1750 Vine Street.
• He died in Bel Air, California.
• There is a theatre named after him in Savannah's Civic Center.
• There is a pier named after him in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, just north of Wilmington.
• He cofounded Cowboy Records.

Bibliography

• Bach, Bob & Mercer, Ginger (1982). Our Huckleberry Friend : The Life, Times, and Lyrics of Johnny Mercer. Lyle Stuart. ISBN.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Furia, Phillip (1990). Poets of Tin Pan Alley. Oxford University Press. ISBN.
• Furia, Phillip (2003). Skylark: The Life and Times of Johnny Mercer. St. Martin's Press. ISBN.
• Lees, Gene (2004). Portrait of Johnny: The Life of John Herndon Mercer. Hal Leonard. ISBN.
• Wilder, Alec (1990). American Popular Song. Oxford University Press. ISBN.
• Will, Max (1997). They're Playing Our Song. Da Capo Press. ISBN.

External links

• (Almost) Too Marvelous For Words: books about Johnny Mercer
• Johnny Mercer's entry at the Songwriters' Hall of Fame
• Johnny Mercer at IMDb
• Johnny Mercer in the Georgia State University Library Special Collections
• Johnny Mercer Foundation
• Johnny Mercer's Grave in Savannah
• List of Johnny Mercer songs on CD
• List of compilations of Johnny Mercer songs