Johnny Mercer: Still With Us After All These Years

“My Aunt Hatty once said that when I was six months old she hummed at me and I hummed right back.” By the age of three or four Johnny Mercer was already listening to records and recalls liking “They Didn’t Believe Me” one of Jerome Kern’s early hits. Thirty years later they would team up to write a couple of big songs at the peak of Mercer’s song writing career in Hollywood.

Perhaps the most prolific lyricist in history, Johnny Mercer’s hugely successful run lasted more than four decades, well into the period when the public’s taste in music had changed. By the time he was no longer writing best sellers, he had produced more than 1,500 songs, many of them in the lexicon of popular music, providing us with another way of expressing our feelings.

John H. Mercer was born in Savannah, Georgia on November 18, 1909, a city so beautiful that during the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman could not bring himself to destroy it during his infamous “march to the sea.” The Mercer household was fairly well off during his early years, and he spent the first twenty in Savannah before moving to New York City, completely infatuated with music of every kind.

Popular music had become ubiquitous by 1928, and songs that Johnny Mercer especially loved – jazz and blues – were booming in Harlem and on Broadway. On the boards were Rodgers, Gershwin, Duke, Kern, Porter, Youmans, and Schwartz, all of whom would go on to lay the foundation for the American Song Book.

Fresh from college, and flushed with success over the campus reaction to his first song “Sister Susie, Strut Your Stuff,” he arrived with a song written for Eddie Cantor which the star turned down. But Cantor, impressed by Mercer’s obvious talent, encouraged him to keep trying. Before long he wrote “Out of Breath and Scared to Death of You” which was used in the Garick Gaieties of 1930.

Johnny Mercer began his career as a singer and songwriter for Paul Whiteman. He made his recording debut in 1932 with the Whiteman band, and also began an association with Yip Harburg. Assigned to apprentice with the extraordinarily gifted lyric writer, He learned a lot from Harburg. It was around this time he met Hoagy Carmichael, who asked him to write a lyric for a song he had composed some years earlier. After laboring for close to twelve months, he produced “Lazy Bones,” which became an instant hit after its first appearance on the radio. In an interview many years later, Mercer claimed that it took him only twenty minutes to do the job.

Although well established as a song writer in New York, he accepted an offer to go to Hollywood and write for the movies in 1935. RKO, which produced low budget musicals, was his first studio, followed by Warner Brothers, where he collaborated with Richard Whiting. He soon had his first big song “I’m An Old Cowhand” for which he did both words and music, performed by his idol Bing Crosby.

Mercer wrote over twenty songs with Whiting, including “Too Marvelous for Words” recorded by everyone from June Christy to Margaret Whiting. Following Richard Whiting’s premature death, he joined Harry Warren, This pairing resulted in forty numbers, the most successful of which were “Jeepers Creepers” and “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.” Johnny Mercer’s most fertile period was in the early 1940’s. Although he wrote with many composers over the course of his long career, besides

Whiting and Warren, he most frequently partnered with Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, and Henry Mancini.

The World War II years produced “That Old Black Magic (inspired by Porter’s “You Do Something to Me,) “This Time the Dream’s on Me,” “Accentuate the Positive,” “Blues in the Night,” “Come Rain or Come Shine” (his only Broadway hit, written for St. Louis Woman,) “Hit the Road to Dreamland,” and several more, all written with Harold Arlen. Mercer and Carmichael reunited for “Skylark,” “How Little We Know,” and “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” which came a bit later.

The Hollywood community honored his work with no less than nineteen Oscar nominations. He lost the first eight times in spite of entries such as “My Shining Hour” and “Dearly Beloved,” composed by Arlen and Kern, respectively. Oscar Hammerstein, who won the Academy Award in 1942 for the lyrics to “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” another composition by Jerome Kern, sent a telegram to Johnny Mercer which said: “Johnny, you was robbed.” The losing song was “Blues in the Night.”

The charm came in 1947 for Mercer and Warren with “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe,” sung by Judy Garland in The Harvey Girls. Five years earlier he had penned “I Remember You,” a huge hit, telling everyone that it was the most direct expression of his feelings for Garland. Mercer had had a passionate affair with Judy Garland beginning when she was nineteen. While the song became a torch standard for many singers, mostly female, Miss Garland never recorded it.

Johnny Mercer won three more Oscars, for “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” in 1952, “Moon River” in 1961 and “The Days of Wine and Roses” in 1962. “Moon River,” which was almost edited out of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and “…Days…” were written with Henry Mancini. Such back to back wins were unprecedented in Hollywood.

John H. Mercer died in California on June 25, 1976 and was buried in Savannah. Just before his death he was approached by Paul McCartney who proposed that they collaborate. He always gave credit for his musical talent to his mother, who sang sentimental ballads and his father, who sang mostly old Scottish folk songs. He was once asked how it was possible for one person to write so many great songs. Referring to “One for My Baby” he answered “When you get a tune like Baby, and you find the right mood, it’s the luckiest thing that can happen to a lyric writer.” To which he added “It’s also the extra hour of work that does it.”

“I’ve always written what I think I want to do, and the way I want it to be.” Another of Johnny Mercer’s heroes, Irving Berlin, said of him “Mercer will always write what he wants to write, and then let the public find out about it.”