Johnny Mercer was born 105 days ago today. Mercer was a lyricist, songwriter and singer. He was also a co-founder of Capitol Records. He is best known as a lyricist, but he also composed music. He was also a popular singer who recorded his own songs as well as those written by others. From the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s, many of the songs Mercer wrote and performed were among the most popular hits of the time. He wrote the lyrics to more than fifteen hundred songs, including compositions for movies and Broadway shows. He received nineteen Academy Award nominations, and won four. Mercer was born in Savannah, Georgia. His father, George Anderson Mercer, was a prominent attorney and real estate developer, and his mother, Lillian Elizabeth (née Ciucevich), George Mercer’s secretary and then second wife, was the daughter of Croatian and Irish immigrants who came to America in the 1850s. Lillians father was a merchant seaman who ran the Union blockade during the U.S. Civil War. The construction of Mercer House in Savannah was started by General Hugh Weedon Mercer in 1860 (although never finished by him; the next owners of the house finished it), later the home of Jim Williams, whose trial for murder was the centerpiece of John Berendts 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. Mercers father also sang, 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 a child, Mercer had African-American playmates and servants, and he listened to the fishermen and vendors about him, who spoke and sang in the 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 at eleven or twelve he had memorized almost all of the songs he had heard and he had become curious about who had written them. He once asked his brother who the best songwriter was, and his brother said Irving Berlin of Tin Pan Alley. Despite Mercers early exposure to music, his talent was clearly in creating the words and singing, not in playing music, though early on he had hoped to become a composer. In addition to the lyrics that Mercer memorized, he was an avid reader and wrote adventure stories. However, his attempts to play the trumpet and piano were not successful, and he never could read musical scores with any facility, relying instead on his own notation 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. Later, Mercer wrote a humorous song called Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing In a Hurry. Though Mercer continued to write songs, it was only when Mercer moved to Hollywood in 1935 that his career was assured. Writing songs for movies offered two distinct advantages. The use of sensitive microphones for recording and of the lip-synching of pre-recorded songs liberated songwriters from dependence on the long vowel endings and long sustained notes required for live performance. Performers such as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers could now sing more conversationally and more nonchalantly. Mercer, as a singer, was attuned to this shift and his style fitted the need perfectly. Mercers first Hollywood assignment was not the Astaire-Rogers vehicle of which he had dreamed, but a B-movie college musical, Old Man Rhythm, to which he contributed two undistinguished songs and even worse acting. His next project, To Beat the Band, was another flop, but it did lead to a meeting and a collaboration with Fred Astaire on the moderately successful Astaire song I’m Building Up to an Awful Let-Down. Mercer’s first big Hollywood song Im an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande was inspired by a road trip through Texas (he wrote both the music and the lyric). It was performed by Crosby in the film Rhythm on the Range in 1936, and from thereon the demand for Mercer as a lyricist took off. Later Mercer met an ideal musical collaborator in the form of Harold Arlen whose jazz and blues-influenced compositions provided Mercers sophisticated, idiomatic lyrics a perfect musical vehicle. Now Mercers 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), which Arthur Schwartz claimed was “probably the greatest blues song ever written.” They went on to compose One for My Baby (and One More for the Road) (1941), That Old Black Magic (1942) and Come Rain or Come Shine (1946). Frank Sinatra was particularly successful with the first two and Bing Crosby with the third. Come Rain was Mercer’s only Broadway hit, composed for the show St. Louis Woman with Pearl Bailey. On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe was a big smash for Judy Garland in the 1946 film, The Harvey Girls, and earned Mercer the first of his four Academy Awards for Best Song, after eight unsuccessful nominations. Mercer re-united with Hoagy Carmichael with Skylark (1941) and the Oscar-winning In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening (1951). With Jerome Kern, Mercer created You Were Never Lovelier for Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth in the movie of the same name, as well as Im Old Fashioned. Mercer co-founded Capitol Records (originally “Liberty Records”) in Hollywood in 1942, along with producer Buddy DeSylva and record store owner Glen Wallichs. He also co-founded Cowboy Records. Mercer by the mid-1940s enjoyed a reputation as being among the premier Hollywood lyricists. He was adaptable, listening carefully and absorbing a tune and then transforming it into his own style. Like Irving Berlin, he was a close follower of cultural fashion and changing language, which in part accounted for the long tenure of his success. Mercer preferred to have the music first, taking it home and working on it. He claimed composers had no problem with this method provided that he returned with the lyrics. Only with Arlen and Whiting did Mercer occasionally work side-by-side. Mercer died in 1976 from a brain tumor. Here, Mercer sings his own composition “Something’s Gotta Give” in 1974.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 05:35:47 +0000