Friday, November 6, 2009

Too Marvelous For Words

Last night I watched Turner Classic Movies’ delightful documentary celebrating Johnny Mercer’s 100th birthday, Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me.  While he was a singer and a composer as well as the co-founder of Capitol Records, Mercer’s greatest fame came as a lyricist, the finest America ever had.  That’s not just my opinion.  Gene Lees, who knew Mercer, in his book, Portrait of Johnny: The Life of John Herndon Mercer, writes this: “Every American lyricist I have known considers, or considered, him the best of them all.”  The list of standards Mercer wrote seems virtually endless and while people may no longer recognize his name, it is well-nigh impossible, even in this musically-impoverished age, for them not to know some of his songs, so ubiquitous have they become.  He differed from Larry Hart, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and some of the other great lyricists of the day in that he was purely American.  A southerner from Savannah, Georgia, shaped by the blues and jazz of his birthplace, Mercer had no old-world European influences and as such his songs had a looser, more natural feel to them.  He spoke the American language, sprinkling his songs with colloquialisms, catch phrases, place-names, and slang, all in a conversational style that hid their technical brilliance.  Terry Teachout captured Mercer perfectly in this excerpt from his 2004 appreciation of Mercer in Commentary magazine (subscription required):

Mercer's brand of lyricism—unabashed yet unsentimental, and expressed with a colloquial directness that conceals extreme technical sophistication—is unmistakable. No one else, for example, could have written a lyric like “Skylark” (1942): “Skylark,/Have you anything to say to me?/Won't you tell me where my love can be?/Is there a meadow in the mist/Where someone's waiting to be kissed?” In its precise rhymes and beautifully shaped cadences, it is obviously a product of the golden age of American songwriting. But no other golden-age lyricist, not even Oscar Hammerstein II, could have aspired to its air of uncontrived simplicity.

Mercer had dozens of collaborators though perhaps his most prolific partnership came with Harold Arlen.  The two wrote some of the most satisfying songs in the American songbook: “That Old Black Magic”, “Blues In The Night”, “One For My Baby”, “This Time The Dreams On Me”, “Come Rain Or Come Shine”, and many more.  In the TCM documentary, which is filled with glorious old footage, Mercer explains that he wrote differently for different performers, tailoring his lyrics to the performer’s personality.  This versatility also conveys to his composing partner.  The same man who wrote the blues-tinged lyrics for Arlen’s compositions would write the wistful lyrics to “Moon River” with Henry Mancini and the melancholy, meandering lyrics to “When The World Was Young” with M. Philippe Gerard.

Johnny Mercer is an American treasure, “America’s Poet” as someone described him in the documentary.  The documentary runs again on November 18 and you should catch it if you can.  Better still, go get some of his music.  Here’s just a taste, Sinatra doing the definitive version of “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)”: 


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