Philip Furia - Skylark: The Life and Times of Johnny Mercer

During what has been called the golden age of American popular song, most of the great songwriters were Jews, immigrants or the children of immigrants, who grew up in New York City in the early twentieth century. One of the greatest of them, however, came from a prominent family in Savannah, Georgia, that could trace its ancestry back to distinguished Scottish forebears. When Irving Berlin was a singing waiter in a Chinatown saloon, inventing risqu parodies to popular tunes of the day and carefully kicking the coins customers tossed at him into a pile behind the bar, Johnny Mercer was cradled by his black nanny. When George Gershwin quit high school to play piano on the stretch of West Twenty-eighth Street known as Tin Pan Alley because it housed the cacophonous offices of many sheet-music publishing firms, Johnny Mercer was a choirboy at Christ Episcopal Church. When Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were struggling to place their urbanely witty songs in Broadway musicals and getting so many rebuffs that Rodgers contemplated giving up music for the childrens underwear business, Johnny Mercer was playing pranks at a fashionable Virginia prep school.

Although Mercer would move among such New York songwriters for much of his life, his genteel southern background would always set him apart. Berlin, the Gershwins, even Cole Porter, another well-to-do Episcopalian who hailed from Peru (pronounced Pee -ru), Indiana, were indoor writers, whose songs radiated the rhythm, energy, and cosmopolitan verve of New York. Mercer, by contrast, was an outdoor writer, whose lyrics drew their imagery from the world of nature and from the American landscape. Consequently, his songs had a greater range and took in more of America than those of any other songwriter. He could be hiply urbane in Satin Doll, elegantly sensuous in That Old Black Magic, down-home folksy in In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening, excitedly childlike in Jeepers Creepers, achingly nostalgic in Days of Wine and Roses.

To Oscar Hammerstein, Johnny Mercer was the most perfect American lyricist alive. American. Pure American. To Yip Harburg, who grew up in wretched poverty on the Lower East Side but went on to write Over the Rainbow, Johnny Mercer was one of our great folk poets, whose lyrics had their roots in the prose of Mark Twain and the songs of Stephen Foster. Mercer had an ability to write from roots different from mine, said Hal David. Even though David has penned such folksy lyrics as Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head and Do You Know the Way to San Jose? he envied Mercers regional roots: He was southern. I am Brooklyn. And he created the most wonderful images. He wrote lyrics I wish I could write, but I knew I couldnt because I came from a different base. Another New York writer, Alec Wilder, once visited Mercer at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. As Wilder got out of his cab, he saw Mercer in the backyard, feeding the birds. Good God, Wilder thought, the man who wrote Mr. Meadowlark, Bob White, and Skylark really does love birds.

What also set Mercer apart from his fellow songwriters was his successful career as a singer, a harbinger of songwriters, such as Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, who perform their own songs. While Mercer was a consummate interpreter of his own works, however, he preferred to sing the songs of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and others he had loved as a boy. He sang with Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, and other big bands on numerous radio programs (including some of his own shows) and, in later years, on television. As a singer, he could interact with performers as other songwriters could not, and he recorded songs with singers as varied as Judy Garland, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, and Bobby Darin. As a radio singer in the 1940s, Johnny Mercer became a household name, and that saved him from the relative oblivion to which most lyricists are consigned by a public that usually associates a song with its composer. Gershwin, to most people, means George Gershwin, even though it was his brother Iras lyrics that made many a Gershwin tune memorable. Mrs. Oscar Hammerstein, so the story goes, grew so tired of composers overshadowing lyricists that when she heard someone refer to Ol Man River as a great Kern song, she said, Jerome Kern did not write Ol Man River. Mr. Kern wrote dum dum dum da. My husband wrote Ol Man River.

While people never refer to a Hammerstein song or a Harburg song, they do speak of a Johnny Mercer song, making Mercer the only lyricist from a generation of brilliant wordsmiths to identify himself with his songs in the public imagination. When Ella Fitzgerald made her classic series of songwriter albums for Verve Records in the 1950s, virtually every album was based on a composer: The Duke Ellington Song Book, The Harold Arlen Song Book The sole exception was The Johnny Mercer Song Book, an album of songs by a single lyricist .

For twenty years, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, Mercer dominated the popular song charts. During that era, he had at least one song in the Top Ten for 221 weeks; for 55 weeks he had two songs in the Top Ten; for 6 weeks he had three songs in that circle; during 2 weeks in 1942, he had four songs therevirtually half the Hit Parade . In some years, he had a song in the Top Ten during every week of the year, the songwriters equivalent of Joe DiMaggios hitting streak, and his songs were number one a record thirteen times. In the course of his career he would write the lyrics, and sometimes the music as well, for 1,088 songs; of these, 18 would be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song, and four would win the Oscar.