Here’s a terrific clip of the great songwriter Johnny Mercer singing a succession of his tunes as Steve Allen sings other’s songs whose themes conjure Mercer counterparts. “A Foggy Day,” for instance, beckons “Come Rain or Come Shine.”
Yip Harburg, lyricist of “Over the Rainbow,” said that the Episcopalian Mercer’s origins in Savannah, Georgia, made him a unique figure in the largely Jewish world of Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths. He hailed him as “the greatest of the folk poets. I think it has something to do with his being from the South. He has the descriptive flair of a Mark Twain, and the melodies of Stephen Foster seem to be part of him.” Can’t you imagine a Twain-Foster co-credit on such bluesy Mercer-Harold Arlen creations as “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Accentuate the Positive,” and “Blues in the Night”?
In addition to Arlen, Mercer collaborated with a Who’s Who of popular song composers, including Harry Warren, Jimmy Van Heusen, Jerome Kern, Jimmy McHugh, and Hoagy Carmichael. He also wrote words to several pieces that began as jazz instrumentals, among them “And the Angels Sing,” “Early Autumn,” and “Satin Doll.” Mercer sang with Benny Goodman on the weekly Camel Caravan radio show in the late Thirties. In his memoir, My Singing Teachers, Mel Torme says that his “bubbly personality lent just the right touch to the proceedings.” Torme adds, “One week in 1939, Benny exhorted Mercer to write words to a Ziggy Elman piece called ‘Fralich in Swing.’ Ziggy played it that week, and on the very next broadcast Mercer turned up with ‘And the Angels Sing,’ complete with a vocal by Martha Tilton.” Torme cites Mercer’s words for the song’s bridge as “a miracle. They brought pictures to the mind. They were miles ahead of ‘moon-June-spoon’ trivia. The song was a runaway hit and Mercer moved up a few notches in the collective mind of the pros and the public.”
Today is John Herndon Mercer’s 105th birthday anniversary. I’ll devote three sets of this evening’s Jazz a la Mode to his songs as sung by Frank Sinatra, Sheila Jordan, Nat King Cole, Mary Stallings, Abbey Lincoln, Ray Charles, John Boutte, Jackie Paris, Tony Bennett, Billie Holiday, and Barbara Ween.