“So far as I’m involved, Johnny Mercer is American literature.” The ones have been singer Tony Bennett’s phrases, uttered a couple of years in the past in appreciation of the person who authored his 1962 hit unmarried “I’ll Be Round,” and whose repertoire of one,500 songs contains such Nice American Songbook evergreens as “Satin Doll,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “Moon River,” and “Accentuate The Positive.”
Bennett, like Frank Sinatra, and the entire nice crooners of that technology, knew that no one may just write a lyric reasonably like Johnny Mercer. He had that uncommon talent to conjure up memorable metaphors and inventive words that vividly painted an image, conveyed an environment, or expressed a sense which right away resonated with the listener. It didn’t topic if he was once being witty and eccentric or darkish and severe, the only consistent was once that he may just all the time write with eloquence.
Born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1909, to an prosperous Southern circle of relatives, John Herndon Mercer was once attracted to tune at an early age and gravitated to jazz and blues as an adolescent. He moved to New York in 1929 to pursue an appearing profession, however began writing songs and in the end wound up co-writing “Lazy Bones” with Hoagy Carmichael, which turned into an enormous hit in 1933. In a while, he determined to check out his success in Hollywood. Writing songs for motion pictures, he in the end hit pay dust with “I’m An Outdated Cowhand (From The Rio Grande),” sung by means of Bing Crosby within the 1936 film Rhythm On The Vary.
Extra massive film tunes adopted within the 40s, together with “Accentuate The Positive” (some other Crosby automobile), “That Outdated Black Magic,” and “Come Rain Or Shine,” all co-written with Harold Arlen. Flushed with good fortune, Mercer co-founded Capitol Information in 1942 after which loved a No.1 US hit beneath his personal title with the ballad “Sweet,” recorded in tandem with the honeyed harmonies of The Pied Pipers.
That exact tune in the end discovered its approach directly to the songwriter’s first and best solo LP for Capitol, 1957’s Accentuate The Positive, which accumulated in combination an collection of in the past issued singles from the forties. By the point it was once launched, 48-year-old Mercer was once a longtime songwriter with an impeccable résumé and had reputedly relinquished his aspirations to proceed his making a song profession.
Even so, Accentuate The Positive was once a excellent reminder that he had loved a a success stint as a hitmaker all the way through the former decade. Certainly, his wealthy, velvety baritone had graced 3 different really extensive 40s US hits featured at the album: the evergreen name observe, which has been recorded by means of everybody from Judy Garland and Dinah Washington to Paul McCartney; the rail travel-themed big-band swinger “On The Atchison, Topeka And The Sante Fe,” which was once additionally a Global Struggle II US chart-topper for Mercer; and the double-entendre-packed “Persona” (with tune by means of Jimmy Van Heusen), a witty meditation on intercourse enchantment.
Much more risqué is “Strip Polka,” an uproarious story a few burlesque dancer which, in spite of its material, is tasteful reasonably than tawdry. In sharp distinction, “I Misplaced My Sugar In Salt Lake Town” and the world-weary ballad (and Sinatra favourite) “One For My Child (And One Extra For The Highway),” whose lyrics Mercer scribbled on a serviette in a New York bar known as PJ Clarke’s, are sober reflections that disclose now not best the affect of Black tradition on Mercer’s writing but in addition display how his jazz sensibility permeated nearly the entirety he wrote.
Total, Accentuate The Positive, with its more than a few hues and moods, encapsulates the variety of Mercer’s oeuvre. Despite the fact that his phrases can veer without problems from flippancy to poignancy, they’re by no means trite. However to name him a wordsmith is to do Mercer, who died in 1976, elderly 66, a gross disservice. Fairly, he was once a Tin Pan Alley poet with a present for storytelling and ear-catching cadences. The proven fact that a lot of his songs – together with “One For My Child” and the name observe from Accentuate The Positive – proceed to be carried out by means of lately’s singers underlines the universality, enduring reputation and, above all, relevance of Mercer’s paintings.
Arguably, the most efficient appraisal of his skill got here from Frank Sinatra, who mentioned: “A Johnny Mercer lyric is the entire wit you want you had and the entire love you ever misplaced.”
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