The New Criterion

“For every man who sits in the bath and sings the words,” the English jazz critic Benny Green once wrote, “there are twenty who walk in the streets and whistle the melody.” Just so; when Ella Fitzgerald created the pantheon of Tin Pan Alley with her celebrated “Songbook” series, the first seven records paid tribute to composers: Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, and Jerome Kern. The last entry was the only one to showcase a lyricist: Johnny Mercer. In the opinion of his peers, it was a tribute fully deserved. “He’s not just a lyricist, he’s a songwriter,” Berlin declared. “Johnny Mercer is a great, great songwriter.”

“Blues in the Night” and “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” are among America’s finest popular songs. The words are Johnny Mercer’s, as are those for “That Old Black Magic,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “And the Angels Sing,” “Day In—Day Out” and “On the Atchinson, Topeka and the Santa Fe.” (Mercer may inspire more “He wrote that?” moments that any other artist from the golden age of popular song.) He received eighteen Academy Award nominations for best song and took home four Oscars. (The last two, in 1961 and 1962, were shared with Henry Mancini, the first songwriting team to win in successive years.) His first popular success, “Lazybones,” came in 1933; in the 1960s, Mercer was still writing hits for Tony Bennett (“I Wanna Be Around”) and Frank Sinatra (“Summer Wind”).

This just skims the 1,200-plus songs collected in The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer, the handsomely produced seventh installment of Knopf’s “Complete Lyrics” series. Mercer worked with everybody—“we have tallied well over two hundred,” the editor Robert Kimball writes, “more, to my knowledge, than those of any other major American songwriter”—stretching from Arlen, Kern, Ellington, and Mancini to Hoagy Carmichael, Harry Warren, Gordon Jenkins, and André Previn. And if no one was available, Mercer could crank out a tune for himself: “Roughly fifteen percent of his songs has music he wrote himself,” Kimball writes; these include the pensive “Dream” and the electrifying “Something’s Gotta Give.”

“I was trying to be as witty as Larry Hart, as sophisticated as Cole Porter, as simple as Irving Berlin, as poetic as Oscar Hammerstein,” Mercer said. To these he added, in the words of the singer Margret Whiting (daughter of the composer of “Too Marvelous for Words”), “an American earthiness.” His sensibility, as the son of a prominent Georgia attorney and descendant of heroes of the American Revolution and the Civil War, was radically estranged from the aggressive, urban attitudes reflected by virtually all of the golden era’s other lyricists. The wistful pastoralism, as in “Skylark” (“Is there a meadow in the mist/ Where someone’s waiting to be kissed?”), with its recurring train imagery (“Hear that lonesome whistle/ Blowin’ cross the trestle”), is the exact opposite of Hart’s self-consciously smart-aleck “Mountain Greenery,” itself a riposte to his own ode to the city, “Manhattan.”

The modesty of a Southern gentleman disguises Mercer’s extraordinary lyricism and erudition. “He’s literate enough to know all those six- and seven-syllable words,” Berlin continued, “but he’s smart enough to know when not to use them.” Mercer’s lyrics, though more subtle and complex than Berlin’s, never flaunt their virtuosity (like Porter’s or Hart’s), stumble over their sincerity (like Hammerstein’s), or strain for effect (like Ira Gershwin’s). The sheer effervescence of “Too Marvelous for Words” cloaks its sophisticated verbal strategy: the song is its own theme, the inability to express itself (“You’re much too much/ And just too very very/ To ever be in Webster’s Dictionary”).

Benny Green, noting that P. G. Wodehouse was kept awake at night at the thought of a triple rhyme scheme, praises how Mercer effortlessly pulls it off in “Midnight Sun”:

The flame of it may dwindle to an ember
And the sun forget to shine,
And we may see the meadow in December,
Icy white and crystalline,
But oh my darling, always I’ll remember
When your lips were close to mine.

So quietly as to be overlooked, the triple rhyme recurs in Mercer’s lyrics, as in “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home”:

Free an’ easy, that’s my style,
Howdy-do-me, watch me smile,
Fare-thee-well me after a while.

More impressive still is the brilliantly stream-of-consciousness “P.S. I Love You,” Mercer’s earliest song to be considered a standard:

Dear, I thought I’d drop a line,
The weather’s cool; the folks are fine;
I’m in bed each night at nine.
P.S. I love you.

He preferred to have the music written first—“In general, good lyricists are better at hearing the words in music than composers are at hearing the music in words”—in order to “get the mood of the tune and try to write the words for it.” This method endeared him to his composers (“I don’t care what you give him,” said Arlen, Mercer’s most frequent collaborator, “he’ll find a way to save it, to help you”) and may account for his remarkable breadth of tone.

Mercer was a master of the comic song. Even the titles can raise a chuckle: “Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry,” “Turn Out the Lights (And Call the Law),” “He’s Dead but He Won’t Lie Down,” “When I’m a Bust in the Hall of Fame”—and try not to smile while singing “Jeepers Creepers,” “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” (inspired by a sermon from that flamboyant ecclesiastical fraud Father Divine), or “Goody Goody” (Mercer’s genial warmth softens the schadenfreude: no kiss-off can be kinder than “And I hope you’re satisfied,/ You rascal, you!”). This good-humored kindliness makes the madcap menagerie of “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” charming rather than corny and softens the frequently sour edge of Al Capp’s caricatures in Li’l Abner (1956), Mercer’s only successful Broadway musical.

His humor, however, often sheathed a sting. “Hooray for Hollywood” became, as Kimball notes, “an instant anthem” as soon as it was recorded in 1938, but the “little fun” Mercer claimed to be having with the “big put-on” of Tinseltown drips acid:

Hooray for Hollywood!
You may be homely in your neighborhood,
But if you think that you can be an actor,
See Mister Factor:
He’d make a monkey look good.

“I’m an Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grand)” probably is remembered as a folk song, its lyrics unrecalled except for the opening that repeats the title and the conclusion of each chorus, “Yippy-I-O-Ki-Ay.” But the lines in between lampoon the modern-day cowboys Mercer saw during a drive through Texas:

I’m a cowboy who never saw a cow.
Never roped a steer cause I don’t know how,
And I sho’ ain’t fixing to start in now.

… … … … … … … … … . .

I’m a riding fool who is up to date.
I know ev’ry trail in the Lone Star State,
’Cause I ride the range in a Ford V-Eight.

The shadow side of Mercer is a gentle melancholy, equally restrained in presentation (“malaise du coeur, a wounded psyche … sadness of the spirit… . You may find traces of them in my songs, but I hope that’s the only place you do”), but unmistakable. For all of his success in New York and Hollywood, Mercer never left home. “If you ask me what makes me tick, I would say that it is that I am from Savannah.” Mercer commented. “I remember Savannah in the old times, and I am overcome by a nostalgia nearly too strong to bear.” The characteristic tone of his ballads is one of moodily wistful longing; think of the haunting “Autumn Leaves”:

The falling leaves
Drift by my window,
The autumn leaves
Of red and gold.

I see your lips,
The summer kisses,
The sunburned hands
I used to hold.

Since you went away,
The days grow long,
And soon I’ll hear
Old winter’s song.

But I’ll miss you most of all, my darling,
When autumn leaves start to fall.

This quality of tantalizing allusiveness gave especial distinction to his movie-title songs, like “Charade,” “Moon River” (whose “huckleberry friend” recalls the black youngsters with whom he gathered fruit during childhood summers), and “Days of Wine and Roses.” Rather than summarize the plot or theme, they evoke mood. Mercer wrote his most popular theme, for Otto Preminger’s Laura, without even seeing the film: “I simply absorbed the tune and let it create an atmosphere for me.”

Mercer called memory “a secret treasure trove … just about the only privacy we have left.” Even his love songs suggest rather than declare; their poignant insinuations of youth and promise irretrievably lost conflate the object of desire with temps perdu, as in (the title says it all) the incandescent “I Remember You”:

When my life is through
And the angels ask me
To recall
The thrill of them all,
Then I shall tell them
I remember you.

Mercer maintained a mature refinement quite exceptional in a profession of moon/ June tawdriness and cynically fabricated emotion. He was that rarest of creatures, a genuine romantic. His songs will endure because they give voice to human yearning, deeper than broken desire, not quite as profound as the soul’s strivings—the terrain of the finest popular art. “Show people,” as Mercer said, “know the value of a laugh and a tear. After all, that’s what the world pays them for.”