Phil Furia from Skylark: the Life and Times of Johnny Mercer
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Phil Furia from Skylark: The Life and Times of Johnny Mercer TO OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN, Johnny Mercer was "the most perfect American lyricist alive. American. Pure American." To Yip Harburg, who grew up in wretched poverty on the Lower East Side but went on to write "Over the Rainbow," Johnny Mercer was "one of our great folk poets," whose lyrics had their roots in the prose of Mark Twain and the songs of Stephen Foster. "Mercer had an ability to write from roots different from mine," said Hal David. Even though David has penned such folksy lyrics as "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" he envied Mercer's regional roots: "He was southern. I am Brooklyn. And he created the most wonderful images. He wrote lyrics I wish I could write, but I knew I couldn't because I came from a different base." Another New York writer, Alec Wilder, once visited Mercer at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. As Wilder got out of his cab, he saw Mercer in the backyard, feeding the birds. "Good God," Wilder thought, "the man who wrote 'Mr. Meadowlark,' 'Bob White,' and 'Skylark' really does love birds." What also set Mercer apart from his fellow songwriters was his successful career as a singer, a harbinger of songwriters, such as Paul Simon and Bob Dylan who perform their own songs. While Mercer was a consummate interpreter of his own works, however, he preferred to sing the songs of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and others he had loved as a boy. He sang with Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, and other big bands on numerous radio programs (including some of his own shows) and, in later years, on television. As a singer, he could interact with performers as other songwriters could not, and he recorded songs with singers as varied as Judy Garland, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby and Bobby Darin. As a radio singer in the 1940s, Johnny Mercer became a household name, and that saved him from the relative oblivion to which most lyricists are consigned by a public that usually associates a song with its composer. "Gershwin," to most people, means George Gershwin, even though it was his brother Ira's lyrics that made many a "Gershwin tune" memorable. Mrs. Oscar Hammerstein, so the story goes, grew so tired of composers overshadowing lyricists that when she heard someone refer to "Ol' Man River" as a great "Kern" song, she said, "Jerome Kern did not write 'Ol' Man River.' Mr. Kern wrote 'dum dum dum da.' My husband wrote 'Ol' Man River.'" While people never refer to a "Hammerstein" song or a "Harburg" song, they do speak of a "Johnny Mercer song," making Mercer the only lyricist from a generation of brilliant wordsmiths to identify himself with his songs in the public imagination. from Sinatra in Drag LIKE MOST PEOPLE I KNOW, I first listened to the great standards of Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, the Gershwins, and the other lyricists and composers of what's been called "The Golden Age of American Song" on the albums Frank Sinatra made in the 1950s.† Now, after studying those songs and songwriters for nearly twenty years, I have to ask myself, had Sinatra not recorded "I've Got You Under My Skin," "I Wish I Were In Love Again," and many other great songs, would they even be standards today? Such songs came from largely forgotten Broadway musicals of the 1920s and '30s. While it's pretty to think that artistry triumphs over time, many beautifully- crafted songs from other musicals of this era have been relegated to period-pieces.† Familiar only to scholars and "show tune" buffs, they are performed, if at all, in historically "correct" reconstructions by teams like William Bolcom and Joan Morris rather than the updated, swinging versions Sinatra gave them.† Songwriters might cavil at Sinatra's cavalier changes of melodies and lyrics (Cole Porter supposedly once fumed, "Mr. Sinatra, if you don't like my songs as I wrote them, please don't sing them"), but his jazzy renditions of these songs, with arrangers such as Nelson Riddle and Billy May, turned them into classics. If Sinatra did well by these songs, they, in turn, did a lot for him.† In his magisterial Sinatra: The Song Is You, Will Friedwald traces the nadir of Sinatra's career in the early 1950s when he was regarded as an over-the-hill bobby-soxer idol.† At Columbia Records, where the gimmicky Mitch Miller had taken charge, Sinatra was given such poor fare to record that at one session he reportedly looked at the lead sheet and announced, "I'm not singing this crap." To be sure, they weren't many good songs by the early 1950s. What Irving Berlin, Ira Gershwin, and other songwriters had predicted back in the 1930s was finally coming true: radio, with its incessant playing of "hits" was wearing out a song's popularity so quickly that the quality of songwriting was deteriorating as composers and lyricists rushed to fill radio's voracious appetite. After Columbia let Sinatra go (or, as he put it, "I fired Columbia") in 1953, he was given a second chance by Capitol, the only record company that, at that point, still believed in artistry. Founded in 1941 by songwriters Johnny Mercer and Buddy DeSylva, along with businessman Glen Wallichs, Capitol developed such talents as Peggy Lee, Jo Stafford, and Nat King Cole and rigorously refused to "cover" hits by other companies with their own singers. Capitol's gamble on Sinatra came at a critical moment in the history of American song. 1954, the year of his first recordings for them, saw the emergence of rock-and-roll with Bill Haley and the Comet's "Rock Around the Clock." That same year Elvis Presley cut his first records in Memphis. The record industry was changing mechanically as well as stylistically. Instead of the standard 78 rpm records, two newer formats had established themselves. The 45 rpm record, developed in 1948, was aimed at a newly affluent teenage market, giving them a song on each side for less than a dollar. The "long- playing" LP record had been developed as far back as 1931, but not until the 1950s did recording and "high fidelity" players make it a feasible product. At first, LPs were confined to classical music and a distinctively "adult" audience, but soon popular singers from the pre-rock era were making "concert" albums of twelve or more songs. Throughout the 1950s, Sinatra cut both LPs and 45s. His 45 singles would feature such contemporary songs as "Young At Heart" and "Hey! Jealous Lover," but for his LPs he turned to a very different repertoire. Like most popular singers, he had always recorded new songs. Very few performers--most notably singer Lee Wiley and bandleader Artie Shaw--had consciously sought out older songs. But the LP format required a large body of songs and given the paucity of artistic quality in contemporary songwriting Sinatra turned to songs of the 1920s and '30s. Sammy Cahn claimed to have been instrumental in leading Sinatra to the gems of Porter, Rodgers & Hart, and other great lyricists and composers. Instinctively, Sinatra must have been drawn to songs written for Broadway musicals, which were tailored to a particular character in a particular dramatic situation. These he could turn into what he called "saloon songs," where he "became" the character delineated in the lyric and acted out a miniature drama in the course of his performance. With the new "high fidelity" recording equipment, Sinatra, who always claimed that his "instrument" was the microphone, could build in subtle nuances of emotion as he "read" a lyric. What is most striking about the older songs Sinatra chose for his Capitol albums is that many of them were written for women performers in stage and screen musicals. Women were usually given a wider range of emotion in these musicals--pensive, melancholy, vulnerable, disconsolate--but with the period's emphasis on wit and sophistication, emotion was usually framed by urbane understatement. Also, since songwriters were still aiming for Tin Pan Alley's popular market, they constructed such "character" lyrics so that they could be popularized, beyond the show or movie, by either male or female vocalists. Frequently, only the verse of a song, often omitted in performances outside the show, might identify the singer as female, while the all-important chorus would be androgynous. Thus in the verse to "My Funny Valentine," from the 1937 musical, Babes In Arms, Larry Hart would portray a woman in love with what she calls a "slightly dopey gent." But in the chorus, the lyrics are only implicitly "feminine," as she admits his "looks are laughable--unphotographable" and his "figure less than Greek." Such sentiments, sung by a male singer, might sound slightly odd-- but also refreshingly different from the stereotypical male fascination with his beloved's face and physical features. Eliminating the "female" verse enabled Sinatra to record many Broadway songs of the 1920s and '30s. "April in Paris," written by Yip Harburg and Vernon Duke for Evelyn Hooey in the 1932 musical, Walk a Little Faster, had a verse where the singer describes herself waltzing down the streets of Paris and getting drunk on a mere tang of wine in the air. Sinatra, as he did with several songs, simply used the release, "I never knew the charm of spring . .," as a verse introduction. Still, the wit of the lyric lies in its spinsterish sentiment.