John Herndon Mercer (November 18, 1909 – June 25, 1976) was an American lyricist, songwriter, and singer, as well as a record label executive who co-founded Capitol Records with music industry businessmen Buddy DeSylva and Glenn E. Wallichs.
He is best known as a Tin Pan Alley lyricist, but he sometimes composed music, despite not knowing piano or standard musical notation, and was a popular singer who recorded his own as well as others' songs from the mid-1930s through the mid-1970s. Mercer wrote the lyrics to more than 1,200 songs, including compositions for movies, Broadway shows, and well-known standards of the time, including "Autumn Leaves", "Days of Wine and Roses", "Hooray for Hollywood", "I'm an Old Cowhand" (music & lyrics), and "Moon River". He received eighteen Oscar nominations and won four Best Original Song Oscars.
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Early life
Mercer was born in 1909, in Savannah, Georgia, where one of his first jobs, aged 10, was sweeping floors at the original 1919 location of Leopold's Ice Cream. Mercer lived on Lincoln Street, a block away from the store's East Gwinnett and Habersham location.
Mercer's father, George Anderson Mercer, was a prominent attorney and real-estate developer. Mercer's mother, Lillian Elizabeth (née Ciucevich), was the daughter of a Croatian immigrant father and a mother with Irish ancestry. Lillian was the senior Mercer's secretary and second wife. Lillian's father, born in Lastovo, in 1834 to Ivana Cucevic and Marijo Dundovic, was a merchant seaman who ran the Union blockade during the Civil War. Mercer was George's fourth son and Lillian’s first. His great-grandfather was Confederate General Hugh Weedon Mercer and he was a direct descendant of American Revolutionary War General Hugh Mercer, a Scottish soldier-physician who died at the Battle of Princeton. Mercer was also a fourth cousin of General George S. Patton.
Mercer liked music as a small child and attributed his musical talent to his mother, who would sing sentimental ballads. Mercer's 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.
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 Gullah language. He was also attracted to Black church services. Mercer later stated, "Songs always fascinated me more than anything." He had no formal musical training but was singing in a choir by six and at 11 or 12 he had memorized almost all of the songs he had heard and became curious about who wrote them. He once asked his brother who the best Tin Pan Alley songwriter was, and his brother said Irving Berlin.
Despite Mercer's 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. 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.
Career
Starting out
Mercer moved to New York in 1928, when he was 19. His first few jobs were as a bit actor (billed as John Mercer). Holed up in a Greenwich Village apartment with time on his hands and a beat-up piano to play, Mercer soon returned to music. He secured a day job at a brokerage house and sang at night. Pooling his meager income with that of his roommates, Mercer managed to keep going, sometimes on little more than oatmeal. One night he dropped in on Eddie Cantor backstage to offer a comic song, but although Cantor did not use the song, he began encouraging Mercer's career. Mercer's first lyric, for the song "Out of Breath (and Scared to Death of You)", composed by friend Everett Miller, appeared in a musical revue The Garrick Gaieties in 1930. (Mercer met his future wife at the show, chorus girl Ginger Meehan; she had earlier been one of the many chorus girls pursued by the young crooner Bing Crosby.) Through Miller's father, an executive at the prominent music publisher T. B. Harms, Mercer's first song was published. It was recorded by Joe Venuti and his New Yorkers.
The 20-year-old Mercer began to frequent the company of other songwriters and to learn the trade. He traveled to California to undertake a lyric writing assignment for the musical Paris in the Spring and met his idols Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong. Mercer found the experience sobering and realized that he much preferred free-standing lyric writing to writing on demand for musicals. Upon his return, he got a job as staff lyricist for Miller Music for a $25-a-week draw, which give him a base income and enough prospects to win over and marry Ginger in 1931. The new Mrs. Mercer quit the chorus line and became a seamstress, and to save money the newlyweds moved in with Ginger's mother in Brooklyn. Johnny did not inform his parents of his marriage until after the fact. In 1932, Mercer won a contest to sing with the Paul Whiteman orchestra, but singing with the band did not help his situation significantly. He made his recording debut, singing with Frank Trumbauer's Orchestra, on April 5 of that year. Mercer then apprenticed with Yip Harburg on the score for Americana, a Depression-flavored revue famous for "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" (not a Mercer composition), which gave Mercer invaluable training. While with Whiteman, he recorded two duets with fellow band member Jack Teagarden, "Fare Thee Well to Harlem" and "Christmas Night in Harlem". The latter was a best-selling record. After several songs which did not catch fire during his time with Whiteman, he wrote and sang "Pardon My Southern Accent" (1934). Mercer's fortunes improved dramatically with a chance pairing with Indiana-born Hoagy Carmichael, already famous for the standard "Stardust", who was intrigued by the "young, bouncy butterball of a man from Georgia." Mercer, later well known for rapidly writing lyrics, spent a year laboring over the ones for "Lazybones", which became a hit one week after its first radio broadcast, and each received a large royalty check of $1250. Mercer became a member of ASCAP and a recognized "brother" in the Tin Pan Alley fraternity, receiving congratulations from Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter among others. Whiteman lured Mercer back to his orchestra, temporarily breaking up the working team with Carmichael.
Hollywood years
Mercer moved to Hollywood in 1935, and began writing music for films. His first Hollywood assignment was a B-movie college musical, Old Man Rhythm, to which he contributed two songs and appeared in a small role. His next project, To Beat the Band, was a commercial flop, but it led to a meeting and a collaboration with Fred Astaire on the moderately successful song "I'm Building Up to an Awful Let-Down".
Mercer landed into a hard-drinking circle, and began to drink more at parties and was prone to vicious outbursts when under the influence of alcohol, contrasting sharply with his ordinarily genial and gentlemanly behavior. Often he would assuage the guilt he felt for this behavior by sending roses the following day to the friend or acquaintance he had treated unkindly while drunk. Ironically, he would later say that he found the Hollywood nightlife lacking: "Hollywood was never much of a night town. Everybody had to get up too early ... the movie people were in bed with the chickens (or each other)."
Mercer's first big Hollywood song, the satirical "I'm an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande", was inspired by a road trip through Texas (he wrote both the music and the lyrics). It was performed by Crosby in the film Rhythm on the Range in 1936, and from then on the demand for Mercer as a lyricist took off. His second hit that year was "Goody Goody", music by Matty Malneck. In 1937, Mercer began working for Warner Bros., working with the composer Richard Whiting, soon producing his standard, "Too Marvelous for Words", followed by "Hooray for Hollywood", the opening number in the film Hollywood Hotel (1937). After Whiting's sudden death from a heart attack, Mercer collaborated with Harry Warren and wrote "Jeepers Creepers", which earned Mercer his first Oscar nomination for Best Song (1938). Another hit with Warren in 1938 was "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby". The pair also created "Hooray for Spinach", a comic song produced for the film Naughty but Nice in 1939.
During a lull at Warners, Mercer revived his singing career. He joined Crosby's informal minstrel shows put on by the "Westwood Marching and Chowder Club", which included many Hollywood luminaries. Mercer worked on numerous duets for himself and Crosby to perform: several were recorded, and two, "Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean" (1938) a reworking of an old vaudville song, and "Mister Meadowlark" (1940), became hits.
In 1939, Mercer wrote the lyrics to a melody by Ziggy Elman, a trumpet player with Benny Goodman. The song was "And the Angels Sing" and, although recorded by Crosby and Count Basie, it was the Goodman version with vocal by Martha Tilton and klezmer style trumpet solo by Elman that became a major hit. Years later, the title was inscribed on Mercer's tombstone.
Radio programs
In 1943, Johnny Mercer's Music Shop was a summer replacement for The Pepsodent Show on NBC. Ella Mae Morse and Jo Stafford were regulars on the program, with musical support from The Pied Pipers and Paul Weston and his orchestra. The Chesterfield Music Shop, a similar program in a 15-minute version, was broadcast in 1944.
1950s–1970s
In the 1950s, the advent of rock and roll cut deeply into Mercer's natural audience, and dramatically reduced venues for his songs. Mercer wrote for several MGM films, including Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and Merry Andrew (1958). He collaborated on three Broadway musicals in the 1950s—Top Banana (1951), Li'l Abner (1956), and Saratoga (1959).
His more successful songs of the 1950s include "The Glow-Worm" (sung by the Mills Brothers) and "Something's Gotta Give". In 1961, he wrote the lyrics to "Moon River" for Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's and for Days of Wine and Roses, both with music by Henry Mancini, and Mercer received his third and fourth Oscars for Best Song. The back-to-back Oscars were the first time a songwriting team had achieved that feat. Mercer, also with Mancini, wrote "Charade" for the 1963 romantic thriller of the same name. The Tony Bennett classic "I Wanna Be Around" was written by Mercer in 1962, as was the Frank Sinatra hit "Summer Wind" in 1965.
Mercer was humble about his work, attributing much of his success 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. However, Mercer and Mandel did collaborate on the 1964 song "Emily" from the film The Americanization of Emily starring Julie Andrews.
In 1969, Mercer helped publishers Abe Olman and Howie Richmond found the National Academy of Popular Music's Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 1971, Mercer presented a retrospective of his career for the "Lyrics and Lyricists Series" in New York, 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, he collaborated on the West End production The Good Companions. He also recorded two albums of his songs in London in 1974, with the Pete Moore Orchestra and with the Harry Roche Constellation, later compiled into a single album and released as ...My Huckleberry Friend: Johnny Mercer Sings the Songs of Johnny Mercer.
Late in his life, Mercer became friends with pianist Emma Kelly. He gave her the nickname "The Lady of Six-Thousand Songs" after challenging her, over several years, to play numerous songs he named. He kept track of the requests, and estimated she knew 6,000 songs from memory.
Posthumous success
In the last year of his life, Mercer became fond of pop singer Barry Manilow, in part because Manilow's first hit record was "Mandy", which was also the nickname 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.
Singing style
Well regarded also as a singer with a folksy quality, Mercer 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 Mercer called Joyce to apologize for the line "So, set 'em up, Joe," explaining "I couldn't get your name to rhyme."
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 Ertegun.
Personal life
In 1931, Mercer married Ginger Meltzer, a chorus girl, later a seamstress. In 1940 the Mercers adopted a daughter, Amanda ("Mandy"). In 1960, Mandy married Bob Corwin, who was a pianist for Peggy Lee, Anita O'Day, and Carmen McRae, and also Mercer's long-time accompanist. They had a son, Jim Corwin, in 1961.
In 1941, Mercer began an affair with 19-year-old Judy Garland, while she was engaged to composer David Rose. Garland ended the involvement when she married Rose. In later years, Garland and Mercer rekindled their affair. Mercer stated that his song "I Remember You" was the most direct expression of his feelings for Garland.
Mercer died in 1976, aged 66, from an inoperable brain tumor, in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. He was buried in Savannah's historic Bonaventure Cemetery. The line-drawing caricature adorning his memorial bench is a reproduction of a self-portrait.
Awards and legacy
Academy Awards
Mercer won four Academy Awards on eighteen nominations for Best Original Song:
1946: "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe" (music by Harry Warren) for The Harvey Girls
1951: "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" (music by Hoagy Carmichael) for Here Comes the Groom
1961: "Moon River" (music by Henry Mancini) for Breakfast at Tiffany's
1962: "Days of Wine and Roses" (music by Henry Mancini) for Days of Wine and Roses
Mercer was also nominated for Best Original Song Score for the 1970 Mancini collaboration Darling Lili.
Other
In 1980, the Songwriters Hall of Fame established the annual Johnny Mercer Award as its highest honor, for songwriters with a history of outstanding creative works. Mercer was honored by the United States Postal Service with his portrait placed on a stamp in 1996. Mercer's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1628 Vine Street is a block away from the Capitol Records building at 1750 Vine Street.
In 1983, Mercer earned a posthumous nomination for a Tony Award for Best Original Score for his original lyrics and for Gene de Paul's original music and score with new songs by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn for the stage musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the 37th Tony Awards, but lost to Andrew Lloyd Webber and T. S. Eliot for Cats.
Mercer was given tribute in John Berendt's 1994 novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The 1997 film adaptation directed by Clint Eastwood features prominently Hoagy Carmichael/Johnny Mercer song "Skylark", sung by k.d. lang. The movie soundtrack contains 14 Mercer songs performed by artists such as Alison Krauss, Paula Cole, and Cassandra Wilson; the film's star, Kevin Spacey, sang Mercer's 1942 hit "That Old Black Magic".
For the occasion of Mercer's 100th birthday in 2009, Eastwood produced a documentary film about Mercer's life and work called The Dream's on Me (Turner Classic Movies). The film was nominated for a Primetime Emmy in the category of Outstanding Nonfiction Special.
The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer was published by Knopf in October 2009. The Complete Lyrics contains the texts to nearly 1,500 of his lyrics, several hundred of them appearing in print for the first time.
In November 2009, a bronze statue of Mercer was unveiled in Ellis Square in Savannah, Georgia, his hometown and birthplace. It was commissioned by the Friends of Johnny Mercer.
The Johnny Mercer Collections, including his papers and memorabilia, are preserved in the library of Georgia State University in Atlanta. GSU occasionally holds events showcasing Mercer's works.
Discography
Johnny Mercer Sings (Capitol, 1950)
Two of a Kind with Bobby Darin (Atco, 1961)
Johnny Mercer with Paul Weston's Orchestra 1944 (Hindsight, 1980)
Sweet Georgia Brown with Paul Weston (Hindsight, 1995)
Johnny Mercer Sings Personality (ASV-Living Era, 2002)
Johnny Mercer: Mosaic Select #28 (Mosaic, 2007)
Mercer Sings Mercer (Capitol, 2009)