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Home , Johnny Mandel, Johnny Mercer, Lady Friend, My Huckleberry Friend, Off to See the World, Pearl Bailey

featuring (Will Robinson)

Tin Pan Alley as most of you probably know is a term associated with what is considered the golden age of American popular song. It began around 1885 going all the way through to the , which is around the time when early rock n roll, i.e. Elvis, started to appear and make the Tin Pan style of song outdated.

Tin Pan Alley refers to a physical area in , on West 28th between 5th and 6th streets, where the publishing companies set shop, hired , and produced popular music. And even though Stephen Foster predated the Tin Pan Alley years, I want to mention him because he was really a pioneer for the era to come and for the main subject of my talk. Foster was the first of many subsequent songwriters whose fathers told him that songwriting was a low life waste of time and there was no money in it. Foster proved his father half right, because Foster made a huge name for himself but unfortunately no money..that went to his publishers, who were literally the publishers of the sheet music.

In the very earlier days of Tin Pan Alley it was all about printed sheet music. Back then the local commercial printing centers were in cities like Chicago, Boston, St Louis, and my hometown New Orleans.. and as songs would become popular locally, the New York music publishers would buy the rights to them. Eventually they started creating the atmosphere to produce and market songs themselves, hence the genesis of Tin Pan Alley.

These NY publishing companies would send out “song pluggers”, which is still the term used by present day music publishers , although today they function in a different way. Back then song pluggers were piano players or singers who would travel around to live venues, primarily minstrel shows at first, then acts, fairs, cycle races, horse races, just about anywhere there was a large gathering of people. And the song pluggers would perform and promote the songs, in turn fueling sheet music sales, which had the potential to make good money. It was not unheard of for a popular song to sell a million plus copies of sheet music

Another reason for Tin Pan Alley’s emergence was the fact that in the late 1800s and early 1900s musical tastes started shifting away from classical music and hymns, over to short songs with melodies and lyrics that could be performed locally.

The theory as to why they actually called it “Tin Pan” Alley comes from the fact that these publishers, probably starting in the early 1900s, had rooms set up in their offices designated for writers, as you still have on Music Row. And almost all these writers back then were piano players who had lyricists working with them. In the early days many of these pianos were doctored a bit by adding pieces of cloth to the piano strings to make them sound more percussive and tinny, so it was said they if you walked through publishers’ offices by the writing rooms it sounded like tin pans banging..so basically a derogatory term that came to be romanticized. And just an aside, if you’re wondering why they wanted the pianos more percussive sounding I think it was because the earlier Tin Pan songs were bouncier, more novelty kind of songs, and they could get a more rhythmic effect that worked well with these songs.

Tin Pan songwriters were mostly Eastern European Immigrants or children of immigrants who grew up in New York City in the early 20th century, and predominantly were Jewish.. names like who was born Isidore Baline, or , the original Russian name being Gershowitz, and there’s also ,who wasn’t a but someone who sang and danced to many Tin Pan Alley songs, was once Frederich Austerlitz.

Not all the Tin Pan Alley guys were immigrants or Jewish however, as there were some exceptions, one of the most famous being who was from Indiana and Episcopalian.

But there was also another notable songwriter who happens to be a favorite of mine, and that is a man named Johnny Mercer. He was quite the anomaly because he was neither of Eastern European immigrant origin, nor from the northeast or midwest, nor Jewish, but rather an Episcopal choir boy from the deep south, the city of Savannah. And though he was predominantly a lyricist, he was also very musical and occasionally wrote music for his own lyrics even though he couldn’t play an instrument.

Alex Wilder, who was a well known Tin Pan songwriter himself, and author who wrote books about Tin Pan Alley, once said “all roads lead through John” (as in Mercer) meaning a huge amount of successful writers were associated with Johnny in some way. It’s said that Johnny was able to bridge the past and the future, the north and south, the urban style of songwriting and the countryside using his folksy style of lyrics and made up jargon. He could write both slangy and classy lyrics at the same time. One historian put it this way, that almost all the writers of that era were “indoor” writers but Mercer was an “outdoor” writer, whose lyrics drew the imagery from the world of nature and the American landscape. As the author Wilfred Sheed said, he widened the vocabulary and subject matter of the New York based standards to embrace a new generation of audiences from all over.

And his timing was very good for what he brought to the table. First during the 1930s and 40s when he had become the hot writer, it was the hey day of the Tin Pan Alley years, and a time when there was a wave of primness that swept in as Prohibition went away and that favored country values over city ones. So as the music became more sophisticated, influenced by , the lyrics also had a new feel to them and the kind of lyrics Johnny wrote came in very handy.

Another reason for Johnny’s good timing that’s important to mention has to do with technology and the invention of the microphone for recording in 1925. Before then a group of musicians and the would all crowd around a large conical horn, play and sing as loudly as they could and record straight to wax cylinders then later on a polyvinyl flat disc. But with the introduction of the microphone and the era of “electric recording” a vocalist could be featured much more easily and he wouldn’t have to project so loudly. So on records you could hear the words better, and the singers could sing softer , more soulfully and emotionally , which is how the crooners came about. Mercer was actually considered a crooner himself with his smooth laid back style.. The band leader once said of Johnny’s singing “it sounded like he was singing in his sleep”.

And these recording improvements really helped radio take off which led to a larger amount of songs and singers being able to reach a wide span of people. It also helped the movie industry immensely. By the 1930s the business had all changed to talkie movies (as they were called) and this caused a shift from NY to LA enticing old vaudeville acts like as well as songwriters to head for Hollywood where the films were being made. The need and demand for good clever lyrics was growing, which again played into Mercer’s strength.

Lastly, something else that really set Mercer apart from other songwriters was that he was a singer and a performer which was rare at that time. Typically the songwriters were songwriters and the performers were performers. But Mercer made a name for himself because he could do both. ( was another example of that, and later Mel Torme) . “Singer songwriters”, as they’ve come to be known, really didn’t start appearing until , , Beatles, etc came onto the scene in the 60s. Will Friedwald , an author and music critic, said in his book, JAZZ SINGING, that Mercer was “one of the greatest rhythm singers of all time , the only songwriter of his time who could have made it had he never written a single song, so catchy was his southern accent and so sure was his command of the beat”

So here you have this Southern boy, gap toothed with a Huck Finn face and a natural charm , who also possessed a sweet easy going style of singing. It’s no wonder that he was a popular guest on the big radio shows thereby self perpetuating his fame like almost no other songwriter at the time could do. He was the only lyricist that later on had records made with only his songs, an example being ’s record The Johnny Mercer Songbook, and another one that I own recorded by the late great Dr John called Mercernary. If a record was going to be made to honor a songwriter it was always the music composer (, , Mancini) but never the lyricist.

The way it tended to work in the Tin Pan Alley era was the songwriter was either a music composer or a lyricist, but very few songwriters did both. The biggest and best example of an all encompassing songwriter was Irving Berlin. But most of the others were teams , and they stuck to what they did best. One did music , one did lyrics. And they wrote often as a team for a long time then switched to writing with someone else, either by suggestion of a movie company, their publisher, or perhaps they grew a little stale writing with the same person and wanted to branch out.

And as you might expect there was a sensitivity about which was more important, music or lyrics. (I have my own theory by the way if anyone would like to hear at another time). There’s the story of when the Kerns and the Hammersteins were at the same party, and Oscar Hammerstein’s wife overheard a conversation someone was having with ’s wife, when that person said , “oh, your husband is Jerome Kern, the one who wrote Old Man River”, and Mrs Hammerstein leaned in and said, “no, actually her husband wrote Dum Dum Dum Dum, my husband wrote Old Man River” (A side story, Irving Berlin, as he got into his 70s and 80s was notorious for being very cantankerous and difficult , and he showed his ego a bit when he declined the offer to be the head of the Songwriter’s Hall Of Fame by saying I’m a songwriter , I do music and lyrics, those other guys are just composers or lyricists…also when Steven Spielberg called him up to ask to use one of his songs, he had his assistant tell Spielberg “I’ve got other plans for that!” Berlin at the time was 98 years old…that’s an optomist)

And while there was always an underlying competitiveness and a little bit of jealousy among the songwriting community , just as there is today among songwriters, even among friends, Mercer’s success it seemed was not resented at all by his competing lyricist peers. Oscar Hammerstein, a brilliant lyricist in his own right, said of him , “Johnny is the most perfect lyricist alive, American, pure American”. , another incredible lyricist who wrote many hits including the lyrics to “” and all the Wizard of Oz songs , said “Johnny Mercer is one of our great folk poets whose lyrics had their roots in the prose of Mark Twain and the songs of Stephen Foster. (By the way, deviating again from the subject at hand, Over The Rainbow was the last song written for The Wizard Of OZ movie and when they were reviewing the test version of the film the studio head Louis B Mayer and some of the other MGM executives all agreed the song needed to be cut from the film as it was too sad. The producer and assistant producer however raised hell and even threatened to quit the film if they took it out, so the executives relented. Just imagine that movie without OVER THE RAINBOW! there are so many great stories like this in the music business)

Another wonderful lyricist, (RAINDROPS KEEP FALLING ON MY HEAD , DO YOU KNOW THE WAY TO SAN JOSE) said “Johnny had an ability to write from roots different from mine, he was southern, I am . He created wonderful images. He wrote lyrics I wish I could write but I knew I couldn’t because I came from a different base”…

Some even said he was more than a great lyricist, that he was a poet. But , the great lyricist, disagreed..he said “Mercer is no poet, Shakespeare was a poet. But Shakespeare was no Johnny Mercer”.

And when the great singer Harry Nilsson was asked who his favorite lyricist was he said Johnny Mercer: “anyone who can rhyme aurora borealis with red and ruby chalice, is not bad”

For 20 years from the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s Mercer dominated the popular song charts. During that era he had at least one song in the Top Ten for 221 weeks,, for 55 weeks he had two songs in the Top Ten, and for 6 weeks he had 3 songs in the top 10, and during 2 weeks in 1942 he had 4 in the top ten, virtually half of the HIT PARADE. Mercer had the songwriter’s equivalent of Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak. 18 songs would be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Songs , 4 would go on to win Oscars.

And these songs were not only huge in their day but have endured to this day, 50, 60, 70 years later, recorded by names like , , , , , Hoagy Carmichael, Garland, , Doris Day , , Fred Astaire, Patti Page, Ella Fitzgerald , Johnny Mathis, , Aretha Franklin, Sammy Davis, Jr, , Roy Rogers, , Harry Connick, Barbara Streisand, and many others. They can be heard on tons of film tracks , old and new, in tv commercials, in revivals, in clubs and cabarets all over the world.

The annual show opens every year with a Mercer song, “Hooray For Hollywood”, which ironically is a total satire about Hollywood

Hooray for Hollywood That screwy, ballyhooey Hollywood Where any office boy or young mechanic Can be a panic, with just a good looking pan Where any bar maid can be a star maid If she dances with or without a fan Hooray for Hollywood Where you're terrific, if you're even good Where anyone at all from TV's Lassie To Monroe's chassis is equally understood Go out and try your luck, you might be Donald Duck Hooray for Hollywood

And all over the country there were , and maybe still are, mothers who would sing to their babies…

You must have been a beautiful baby You must have been a wonderful child When you were only startin’ to go to kindergarten I bet you drove the little boys wild And when it came to winning blue ribbons You must have shown the other kids how I can see the judges' eyes as they handed you the prize I bet you made the cutest bow Oh you must've been a beautiful baby 'Cause baby look at you now ( wrote the music) or how about the dad who might sing to his kid who gets on a horse for the first time, “I’M AN OLD COWHAND FROM THE RIO GRANDE”, which was Johnny’s first movie hit from the movie , and this is actually one he wrote by himself on a drive through when he was driving back to Savannah from LA. It took him 3 days just to get through Texas and in the car he was so bored he came up with the music and lyrics. And it too had some satire, making fun of Hollywood cowboys after seeing the real deal in Texas.

I'm an old cowhand from the Rio Grande But my legs ain't bowed and my cheeks ain't tan I'm a cowboy who never saw a cow Never roped a steer 'cause I don't know how Sure ain't a fixing to start in now yippie yi-o kayah, yippie yi-o kayah

and then there’s the scorned lover’s theme song:

It's quarter to three, there's no one in the place Except you and me So set 'em' up Joe, I got a little story I think you should know We're drinking my friend, to the end Of a brief episode So make it one for my baby And one more for the road or maybe you’ve seen the Foster Grant sunglass tv ad where they play: jeepers creepers, where'd ya get those peepers? Jeepers creepers, where'd ya get those eyes? Oh, gosh all, git up, how'd they get so lit up? Gosh all, git up, how'd they get that size?

John Mercer was born in 1909 into an old Southern family in Savannah, Ga. His father was a well to do attorney with a thriving real estate business. Mercer grew up with black maids and servants, and he was friends with the kids of the servants. When he was a teenager there were a lot of records coming out referred to as “race records” by the famous black singers of the time like Louis Armstrong, , , and they were sold in white owned record stores in the black part of town. So that’s where Mercer used to go with his cousin Walter Rivers, and he said they always felt safe there. In an interview he once said as a well to do white boy he always felt compelled to buy at least one record on every visit. And because he used to go a lot and was such a good customer he was allowed to stay and listen to records for hours, something that was usually strongly discouraged. He would talk to the black customers , swapping stories and absorbing the sound of the local Geechee dialect, also known as Gullah

Growing up Mercer listened to a lot of jazz and which influenced greatly his style, an there was a black jazz base in most of what Johnny sang and wrote. Later, after he got famous, he received a citation from one black social group calling him “our favorite colored singer”.

Mercer attended 5 years at Woodberry Forrest School, the prominent boarding school in Va, and while there he started to write his first songs, which were typically playful and fun songs. He did have thoughts at this early age of being a songwriter, but originally wanted to be a composer rather than a lyricist. However, he really showed no interest in learning how to play the piano, a bit of a problem if you want to compose music. His parents tried to get him to play the piano when he was young , but he gave up after a few lessons because he feared other boys would call him a sissy.

As fate would have it, after graduating from Woodberry Forrest, Mercer’s first break occurred as a result of the depression and the fact that it wiped his father’s real estate business out. (a side story to this is years later after Mercer had become wealthy he paid back all the friends of his Dad or their surviving heirs, who had lost money in his Dad’s real estate bust) So instead of going off to Princeton or Yale like might have been expected of him, Johnny decided to go up to New York, though originally it was because he wanted to be an actor.

And it was good timing for Mercer to show up in New York in 1928, not only for the reasons I mentioned early to do with the mood of the country or the technological advances, but also because by the late 1920s the Jazz Age was starting to really peak as the Renaissance started to expose the music that Johnny had been listening to in the black record stores and bringing it into the mainstream, Whites were heading into Harlem at that time to hear Louis, Bessie, and Duke. Blues and jazz started to rub off on Tin Pan Alley songs like AM I BLUE and THE . And there was an emergence of American History in the Broadway musicals, such as Showboat (Kern and Hammerstein) featuring OL MAN RIVER and CAN’T HELP LOVIN DAT MAN. Again, all playing into what Johnny had to offer.

As I mentioned Mercer went to NY to chase his acting and he did get a few good bit parts in legitimate theatre. But when an old Woodberry Forrest friend who was living up there invited him to share an apartment , and this friend happened to have a piano, Mercer started turning to his other interests of picking out tunes and coming up with song lyrics and poems

A turning point came for Johnny when he somehow talked his way into the dressing room of who was starring in Ziegfeld’s Broadway production of Whoopee. He got into the elevator with the chorus girls and then made his way past the doorman , knocked on the dressing room door, and walked in. Cantor was, needless to say, shocked that this 19 year old kid had just made his way into his dressing room , however, instead of kicking Mercer out he was very magnanimous and let Johnny sing his songs right there to him a cappella . One of them was called EVERY TIME I SHAVE I CUT MY ADAM’S APPLE. After hearing his songs Cantor told Mercer he was going to work one of them into his show, and even though that never actually happened , that meeting did begin a nice letter writing relationship with tons of encouragement from Cantor to Mercer for him to keep writing. And Johnny always attributed a great deal of his success to that encouragement.

When Johnny was 21 years old in 1931 he clashed with his old Savannah social rules that he grew up under by marrying a showgirl , Ginger Meehan, who was not only northern but also Jewish. For a year he had been wanting her to marry him but she considered him to emotionally and financially unsettled so she resisted. But then he got signed to his first publishing deal with Miller Music for $25/week, and wrote songs for a new musical show called Jazz City that looked like it had a lot of potential. So, on the hope that he was starting to really make it and the show would bust him wide open, they got married. Instead however that musical fell victim to the Depression and the show never got produced.

During this time though he got hired as a singer by Paul Whiteman, the famous bandleader I mentioned earlier who had a weekly radio show, and while working on that show Mercer started feeding songs to Whiteman , which led to Mercer having some success and becoming known in the music community.

Other breaks started to come and before he knew it he was meeting his songwriter heroes and performers , some who he would end up collaborating with, something totally new to him at this point. As fewer and fewer acting jobs came about he began to devote more time to writing songs, so although he really wanted to be an actor it was becoming apparent that had no choice but to be a songwriter. His last real shot at acting came in1935 the year Mercer moved to Hollywood and signed a brief deal as both a songwriter and a singing actor with RKO . But after a couple of bad movies he basically never got a call again for acting. But by now , in his late 20s, he had made a name for himself as an actor, a singer, AND a songwriter , though people were coming after him not for his acting but for his songs.

I’d like to talk briefly about Mercer’s process of writing that was as unusual to his surroundings as he was. Most of the writers in those days sat in the writing room together and went back and forth working on melody and lyric, but Johnny usually preferred to get the whole melody in his head, after he first mastered it amazingly fast and retained it without the composer having to play it over and over like would usually be necessary. And then he would go off on his own to write the lyrics. Harry Warren, one of Johnny’s most successful collaborators, said Johnny would listen to a melody to hear what it meant to him and then want to be alone. Harry was actually one of the only writers Johnny didn’t mind getting into a room with, however even with Harry he would often get quiet for hours in front of him. One time Harry said he was writing with Johnny and could tell he wanted to be alone so he got up to go out to lunch, and on the way out said, “by the way John , how’s Ginger?”, to which Harry got silence as Johnny had drifted off in his mind somewhere. But after Harry got back from lunch hour and a half later Johnny , still lying down with his eyes closed, said “she’s fine”. His usual routine was to lie on his back eyes closed and appear to be napping, then he would come out of his trance hours later with a lyric, sometimes a couple of versions, or sometimes with nothing.

He was a painfully slow writer, and it frustrated many of his co-writers. One particular lyric took him so long to write that when he finally called up his co- writer Hoagy Carmichael to tell him “I got it, I finished the lyric” , Hoagy couldn’t even recall having written the tune. Well, that song ended up being the classic, “Skylark”, which is one of my favorite Mercer lyrics

Skylark Have you anything to say to me? Won't you tell me where my love can be? Is there a meadow in the mist Where someone's waiting to be kissed?

Skylark Have you seen a valley green with spring Where my heart can go a-journeying Over the shadows and the rain To a blossom covered lane?

And in your lonely flight Haven't you heard the music of the night? Wonderful music, faint as a will o' the wisp Crazy as a loon Sad as a gypsy serenading the moon

Skylark I don't know if you can find these things But my heart is riding on your wings So if you see them anywhere Won't you lead me there

Johnny by the mid 1930s was exploding as a writer, and the great singer Margaret Whiting said “if you were a composer you tried to get as your lyricist either Johnny Mercer or (wrote lyrics for BABY IT’S COLD OUTSIDE, SLOW BOAT TO CHINA , or the musical Guys and Dolls)

By 1941 Mercer had reserved a place in the musical universe, where even songs that he didn’t write were attributed to his influence, like Chattanooga Choo Choo and Small Fry (written by Hoagy and Frank Loesser , but sung by Johnny Mercer in 1938 as a with Bing Crosby). Johnny had become a style unto himself that others emulated.

By 1942 , after having lived in L.A. for 7 years where he had moved to take advantage of Hollywood’s demand for songs, Mercer had grown frustrated with the current state of the recording industry , so he and a Music Store owner in L.A. got someone to back them with $25,000 and they founded . Johnny became the head of A&R (Artist and Repetoire) , which afforded him a great outlet for songs . So he cranked them out, and many were sung by the artists that he ended up signing , including Margaret Whiting, , , , Mel Torme, and others. Eventually in 1955 they sold the label to the British company EMI and another 7 or so years later Capitol would become the label for

Mercer also co-founded the in 1969 in NY and now the highest honor that one can receive is called the Johnny Mercer Award, which they started giving out in 1980, four years after he had died from brain cancer at age 66.

So as I said earlier Johnny was very well liked by people in the entertainment business and he was known to have worn the same face for the public that he did for his friends. HOWEVER there is one big asterisk by his name….

He developed over the years a bad drinking problem and from time to time, only in private among friends and business peers, a dark side came out , and he reverted to a totally different personality from his normal amiable nature. He became during these instances a mean drunk, the kind of drunk that would denounce or lash out to anyone within earshot , and often to people he was very fond of and loved. He once said to Irving Berlin who he greatly admired, “Well Irving, you couldn’t write a lyric out of brown paper bag!” to which Berlin , knowing Mercer would be mortified in the morning, just smiled and said “Well, I think you’re right, Johnny, good night”

While talking about an up and coming lyricist at a party he said, “that guy can’t write..I could eat alphabet soup and crap better lyrics than that”

Once while he was in the audience at a bar there was a pianist performing on stage who had recently written his first big hit song, which he kept interspersing among the other songs he played, and after hearing it over and over, Mercer shouted, “Hey, why don’t you play us a medley of your HIT!”

He reserved most of his anger however for his wife Ginger, who would forgive him afterwards. He once said to her “what are you? just an ugly old woman who keeps hanging around” and another time while drunk at a party he even poured a drink over her head. (now I wouldn’t try that one at home)

The only good thing that could be said is without fail Johnny would wake up the next morning with huge regret. He would remember what he had done or said unlike many who get that intoxicated. It was very for him to send flowers with a note of apology the next day after a party or event where he misbehaved, so much so that one lady friend of his at a party walked up to him early on and said ‘Johnny, don’t send me flowers tomorrow, please!’

Another time at a party upon making the acquaintance of a future co-writer, Mercer said to him, “If I drink too much and say ugly things to you I don’t mean it”

He seemed to get more bitter as he got older , and that bitterness was exacerbated by the realization that the world of popular song which he had ruled for almost 2 decades was moving away from him and his kind of music. He felt he had slipped even before he slipped, as if he was waiting for failure to find him.

One big source of frustration for him was that he never had a Broadway hit musical. He used to think the only way his songs would live on was if they were in hit musicals that could keep the songs alive over time. Of course we see now that he didn’t need that to happen for his songs to survive. He put a lot of effort over 3 decades into broadway musicals but for various fluky reasons none of them were hits except for the mild success of L’il Abner. He did have one Broadway standard though, , which came from his musical St Louis Woman, even though the musical was not considered a success

So to wind this down, I want to mention some of the other classic Mercer songs, of which there are so many

Does this sound familiar?

You've got to ac-cent-chuate the positive Eliminate the negative Latch on to the affirmative Don't mess with Mister In-Between You've got to spread joy up to the maximum Bring gloom down to the minimum Have faith or pandemonium Liable to walk upon the scene To illustrate his last remark Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark What did they do Just when everything looked so dark Man, they said we better, accentuate the positive or how about these… , FOOLS RUSH IN , , , , MY , AUTUMN LEAVES, LAZYBONES, COOL, COOL, COOL OF THE EVENING, WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG, EMILY, I’M OLD FASHIONED , LAURA and then how about this one:

When an irresistible force such as you Meets an old immovable object like me You can bet just as sure as you live Something's got to give Something's got to give Something's got to give another wonderful though little less known song from the St Louis Musical , IT’S A WOMAN’S PREROGATIVE, sung by

Promise everything Honey, don’t swerve Throw him a curve String em along till they show you what they got in reserve Though his bank shows a big balance And he seems heaven designed If the boy’s short on his talents It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind

(boy don’t we all know that!)

And then there was the Oscar winning song THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES, which he wrote with , someone he had started writing with in the towards the very end of his career at a time when he was feeling useless and unwanted.

And this segues into the last song I’ll talk about, which is my favorite Johnny Mercer song and what I consider to be a perfect song, both musically and lyrically, a true marriage where one could or should not have existed without the other:

Originally Mancini, who considered himself more a film scorer than a writer for songs, was asked to write the score and theme song for the movie Breakfast At Tiffany’s. And he looked to Mercer for the lyric. It was 1961 and was the first time Mancini and Mercer had ever worked together. Johnny lived with the melody for a while and came back with 2 lyrics, the second one being a lyric inspired by his childhood days when he and his cousin Walter Rivers, the same one he hung around the record stores with, would go down to the Back River and pick huckleberries. These were very fond memories for Mercer. And since BACK wasn’t a great word to sing, as it just didn’t have that open vowel sound that you want for long notes, he looked on a map and saw there was a Moon River near Blufton, South Carolina and he changed it to that.

Two quick stories about this song, the first being that his great friend who he trusted , the singer Margaret Whiting , tried to talk him into changing the word “huckleberry” , saying what is a “huckleberry friend”? She said it threw the whole song out of context. He slept on it and called her next day and said he was sticking with his instincts and keeping it. Then the movie producer after the test screening decided that the film was too long and they should cut the theme song out to save time as it wasn’t anything special. But and others around insisted it stay in the film , so it made it into the film , won the Oscar for Best song, and the rest is history.

And to wrap this all up, fast forward roughly 3 decades. It was 1990 and there I was, a fairly young songwriter having a really good run on Music Row coming off my 5th number 1 song and 2nd top ten. And I was asked by ASCAP (American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers) to go up to D.C. to walk the halls of Congress with a group of other songwriters from NY to lobby for some music legislation that was very important at the time. It turns out those other songwriters were mostly comprised of legendary writers from that Tin Pan Alley era and just after ,,most of them in the twilight of their careers and their lives but who wanted to make a difference for future songwriters.

So there I was hanging out for 2 full days and nights with none other than Henry Mancini , Sammy Kahn, Burton Lane, , , Lieber and Stoller, and some newer guys like the Hall of Famer Allen Toussaint from my hometown.. so I went up there from Nashville with Teddy Gentry, one of the members of band Alabama. And on the last day of our lobbying they had a reception in a fairly intimate space where they brought in a grand piano, and all these Senators came to it, including Teddy Kennedy , John McCain, John Glenn, Daniel Inouye, John Breaux, Strom Thurmond, John Kerry, Alan Simpson and others…

The great writing team of Lieber and Stoller got on the piano first and sang a medley of their hits including Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock, then Johnny Mandel gets up and does the theme from Mash, Sammy Kahn does My Kind Of Town, Burton Lane does Old Devil Moon and maybe On A Clear Day, Cy Coleman does one his hits, Witchcraft, and then finally Henry Mancini gets on the piano bench and for the grand finale of the reception plays Moon River.

Moon river, wider than a mile I'm crossing you in style some day Dream maker, you heart breaker Wherever you're going, I'm going your way

Two drifters, off to see the world, there's such a lot of world to see We're after the same rainbow's end, waiting round the bend , moon river and me

And I looked over and saw a whole row of Senators, Republicans and Democrats alike, all arms around each others backs , swaying to Moon River, some of them with tears coming down there faces, and I thought, “yes!, we’re gonna win this legislation battle” and sure enough we did. So there IS power in a song sometimes, and Johnny Mercer is proof of that.