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(More customer reviews)Ira Gershwin has the oft-quoted line: "Any resemblance between popular song lyrics and actual poetry is purely coincidental." He must not have been very familiar with Johnny Mercer's work.
Mercer doesn't display the cosmopolitan wit, mordant ironies, and dazzling word play of Cole Porter. Nor does he exhibit the finely honed literary skills and heart-breaking personal vulnerability (thinly disguised by ironic, verbal defense mechanisms) of Lorenz Hart. But Johnny Mercer is said to have more #1 songs than any other lyricist, and he's clearly the favorite of the great American singers. When Ella Fitzgerald did her landmark Great American Songbook series for Verve records beginning in the 1950s, each of the fourteen albums was devoted to a composer--with one exception: The Johnny Mercer Songbook (Verve, 1964). Numerous similar recordings devoted exclusively to Mercer have followed.
What's the attraction of Johnny Mercer? First, and maybe foremost, he's a Southern American writer. He knows "Southern Gothic," Southern vernacular and black dialect, story-telling and the oral tradition. In favor of going to college, he absorbed the indigenous culture around Savannah, combing record stores for every "race record" (recordings targeted at African-American audiences) he could find. His story is similar to that of a writer like Faulkner, whose formal education is spotty and who learned from the books in his immediate surroundings in Oxford, Mississippi.
The result is a poet who is more direct and plain-spoken than most, a story-teller whose range exceeds that of practically every other lyricist, an authentic and very "American" artist whose lyrics record the sights and sounds with which all Americans can resonate, and finally the most "Romantic" lyricist of them all, dwelling not simply on love and its obsessions, rewards and punishments, but on the "natural world" and the mind's intersection with it. In song after song, he celebrates nature and the life force, or he draws upon nature for his metaphoric language about the the experience--more precisely, the "memory"--of being in love. Wordsworth insisted that poetry is the "overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquillity." At the end of "I Remember You," Mercer's version takes him to death's door: "When my life is through / And the Angels ask me to recall / The Thrill of it all, / I Shall tell them I REMEMBER you."
They say he may have been manic-depressive, an alcoholic, a disappointed perfectionist (so what's new? the same can be said about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner). But it's true that some of his music is light and even flippant--Goody Goody, Jeepers Creepers, Accentuate the Positive. But read the lyrics again, and more closely this time. More often than not, Mercer is subversive, radical, counter-cultural (like all great artists)--even in his novelty songs. "G. I. Jive" was a big World War II hit that he wrote and performed. But notice that he does it in black dialect and that the language, moreover, is "coded." The song is, in effect, a complete send-up of the military--the food, the inadequate equipment, the mechanical routines. One wonders if listeners were more tolerant back then or whether, like many listeners today, they simply weren't paying attention.
But if you need proof of Mercer's greatness, all you need to do is sample one portion of his lyric for Hoagy Carmichael's "Skylark." Anyone who has read the Romantic poets--Wordsworth ("poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity"), Shelley ( ("To a Skylark"), Keats ("To a Nightingale"), and Coleridge ("Kubla Khan")--will recognize in Mercer the same reaching for the transcendent, the sublime, and the enduring.
First, some examples from the Romantics, beginning with Shelley's "To a Skylark": "What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not / Drops so bright to see, As from thy presence showers a rain of melody:" And, a bit later in the same poem, "Like a glow-worm golden" (a gratuitous reminder for most readers, no doubt, but Mercer wrote a song called "Glow Worm"). And from Coleridge's "Kubla Khan": "A savage place! / As holy and enchanted / As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing for her demon-lover!"
Kipling called the aforementioned Coleridge verse the greatest poetic line ever written. Perhaps so, but I'm not ashamed to put alongside it the one written by Mercer: "And in your lonely flight, haven't you heard the music in the night? Wonderful music! Faint as a will o' wisp, crazy as a loon, Sad as a gypsy serenading the moon."
Like the aforementioned poets (regarding the bird's song, Keats in "To a Nightingale," finally asks, "Was it a vision or a waking dream?"), Mercer most likely never found a conclusive, definitive answer. But concerning the search for elusive, ineffable beauty, no lyricist has phrased the question more poignantly, and none has come closer to capturing that essential truth, or beauty--even if the questioner himself was all too keenly aware that the object of his search was doomed, that it was simply "Too Marvelous for Words."
But as great as he was, it's his ability to touch (not merely impress or entertain) people that matters most. I know of few readers, let alone listeners, who have the intestinal fortitude to make it through these posthumous lines by Mercer (who was born in November):
"And when October goes, The snow begins to fly. Above the smoky roofs I watch the planes go by.
The children running home Beneath a twilight sky. Oh for the fun of them! When I was one of them!
And when October goes, The same old dream appears, And you are in my arms To share the happy years.
I turn my head away To hide the helpless tears. Oh how I hate to see October go."
[Be prepared for a month's worth of Wednesdays devoted to Johnny Mercer, the man and his music, on TMC (Turner Movie Classics) throughout the month of November (the month of Johnny's birth one hundred years ago). Having previewed at least a part of the series, I can attest that, although Mercer's music is not always performed by America's most "high-power" singers, the liberal use of clips of Johnny Mercer himself--both in performance and in interviews--is well worth the time of anyone who admires Mercer and/or the Great American Songbook and/or American musical theater and jazz. The series is produced, incidentally, by Clint Eastwood, the jazz lover (who happens to be a film star and director) responsible for two of the art form's most noteworthy (and admittedly few) films: "Straight, No Chaser" (the definitive video profile of Thelonious Sphere Monk) and "Bird" (the feature-length docudrama about the alto saxophonist who singlehandedly (with lots of help from Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell) revolutionized and expanded the horizons of American music in the mid-1940s. Finally, any viewer with sensitive ears must have noticed on the soundtrack of the Clint Eastwood-Meryl Streep soaper, "The Bridges of Madison County," the music of Johnny Hartman, Dinah Washington, John Coltrane and other American jazz greats. Eastwood, to boot, is father to a talented bassist son, Kyle. The American icon is indeed Dirty Harry--but with "big ears."]
[Finally, lest there be lingering suspicions that Mercer was a light-weight, this volume will surely dispel them. It's the heaviest book I've ever received from Amazon. In itself, a persuasive argument on behalf of Amazon Prime or the Kindle, take your pick.]
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The seventh volume in Knopf's critically acclaimed Complete Lyrics series, published in Johnny Mercer's centennial year, contains the texts to more than 1,200 of his lyrics, several hundred of them published here for the first time.Johnny Mercer's early songs became staples of the big band era and were regularly featured in the musicals of early Hollywood. With his collaborators, who included Richard A. Whiting, Harry Warren, Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, and Harold Arlen, he wrote the lyrics to some of the most famous standards, among them, "Too Marvelous for Words," "Jeepers Creepers," "Skylark," "I'm Old-Fashioned," and "That Old Black Magic."During a career of more than four decades, Mercer was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song an astonishingeighteen times, and won four: for his lyrics to "On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe" (music by Warren), "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" (music by Carmichael), and "Moon River" and "Days of Wine and Roses" (music for both by Henry Mancini).You've probably fallen in love with more than a few of Mercer's songs–his words have never gone out of fashion–and with this superb collection, it's easy to see that his lyrics elevated popular song into art.
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