39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ira Gershwin was wrong: Johnny Mercer was a poet., October 20, 2009
This review is from: The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer (Hardcover)
Ira Gershwin has the oft-quoted line: "Any resemblance between popular song lyrics and actual poetry is purely coincidental." He must not have been very familiar with Johnny Mercer's work.
Mercer doesn't display the cosmopolitan wit, mordant ironies, and dazzling word play of Cole Porter. Nor does he exhibit the finely honed literary skills and heart-breaking personal vulnerability (thinly disguised by ironic, verbal defense mechanisms) of Lorenz Hart. But Johnny Mercer is said to have more #1 songs than any other lyricist, and he's clearly the favorite of the great American singers. When Ella Fitzgerald did her landmark Great American Songbook series for Verve records beginning in the 1950s, each of the fourteen albums was devoted to a composer--with one exception: The Johnny Mercer Songbook (Verve, 1964). Numerous similar recordings devoted exclusively to Mercer have followed.
What's the attraction of Johnny Mercer? First, and maybe foremost, he's a Southern American writer. He knows "Southern Gothic," Southern vernacular and black dialect, story-telling and the oral tradition. In favor of going to college, he absorbed the indigenous culture around Savannah, combing record stores for every "race record" (recordings targeted at African-American audiences) he could find. His story is similar to that of a writer like Faulkner, whose formal education is spotty and who learned from the books in his immediate surroundings in Oxford, Mississippi.
The result is a poet who is more direct and plain-spoken than most, a story-teller whose range exceeds that of practically every other lyricist, an authentic and very "American" artist whose lyrics record the sights and sounds with which all Americans can resonate, and finally the most "Romantic" lyricist of them all, dwelling not simply on love and its obsessions, rewards and punishments, but on the "natural world" and the mind's intersection with it. In song after song, he celebrates nature and the life force, or he draws upon nature for his metaphoric language about the the experience--more precisely, the "memory"--of being in love. Wordsworth insisted that poetry is the "overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquillity." At the end of "I Remember You," Mercer's version takes him to death's door: "When my life is through / And the Angels ask me to recall / The Thrill of it all, / I Shall tell them I REMEMBER you."
They say he may have been manic-depressive, an alcoholic, a disappointed perfectionist (so what's new? the same can be said about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner). But it's true that some of his music is light and even flippant--Goody Goody, Jeepers Creepers, Accentuate the Positive. But read the lyrics again, and more closely this time. More often than not, Mercer is subversive, radical, counter-cultural (like all great artists)--even in his novelty songs. "G. I. Jive" was a big World War II hit that he wrote and performed. But notice that he does it in black dialect and that the language, moreover, is "coded." The song is, in effect, a complete send-up of the military--the food, the inadequate equipment, the mechanical routines. One wonders if listeners were more tolerant back then or whether, like many listeners today, they simply weren't paying attention.
But if you need proof of Mercer's greatness, all you need to do is sample one portion of his lyric for Hoagy Carmichael's "Skylark." Anyone who has read the Romantic poets--Wordsworth ("poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity"), Shelley ( ("To a Skylark"), Keats ("To a Nightingale"), and Coleridge ("Kubla Khan")--will recognize in Mercer the same reaching for the transcendent, the sublime, and the enduring.
First, some examples from the Romantics, beginning with Shelley's "To a Skylark": "What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not / Drops so bright to see, As from thy presence showers a rain of melody:" And, a bit later in the same poem, "Like a glow-worm golden" (a gratuitous reminder for most readers, no doubt, but Mercer wrote a song called "Glow Worm"). And from Coleridge's "Kubla Khan": "A savage place! / As holy and enchanted / As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing for her demon-lover!"
Kipling called the aforementioned Coleridge verse the greatest poetic line ever written. Perhaps so, but I'm not ashamed to put alongside it the one written by Mercer: "And in your lonely flight, haven't you heard the music in the night? Wonderful music! Faint as a will o' wisp, crazy as a loon, Sad as a gypsy serenading the moon."
Like the aforementioned poets (regarding the bird's song, Keats in "To a Nightingale," finally asks, "Was it a vision or a waking dream?"), Mercer most likely never found a conclusive, definitive answer. But concerning the search for elusive, ineffable beauty, no lyricist has phrased the question more poignantly, and none has come closer to capturing that essential truth, or beauty--even if the questioner himself was all too keenly aware that the object of his search was doomed, that it was simply "Too Marvelous for Words."
But as great as he was, it's his ability to touch (not merely impress or entertain) people that matters most. I know of few readers, let alone listeners, who have the intestinal fortitude to make it through these posthumous lines by Mercer (who was born in November):
"And when October goes, The snow begins to fly. Above the smoky roofs I watch the planes go by.
The children running home Beneath a twilight sky. Oh for the fun of them! When I was one of them!
And when October goes, The same old dream appears, And you are in my arms To share the happy years.
I turn my head away To hide the helpless tears. Oh how I hate to see October go."
[Be prepared for a month's worth of Wednesdays devoted to Johnny Mercer, the man and his music, on TMC (Turner Movie Classics) throughout the month of November (the month of Johnny's birth one hundred years ago). Having previewed at least a part of the series, I can attest that, although Mercer's music is not always performed by America's most "high-power" singers, the liberal use of clips of Johnny Mercer himself--both in performance and in interviews--is well worth the time of anyone who admires Mercer and/or the Great American Songbook and/or American musical theater and jazz. The series is produced, incidentally, by Clint Eastwood, the jazz lover (who happens to be a film star and director) responsible for two of the art form's most noteworthy (and admittedly few) films: "Straight, No Chaser" (the definitive video profile of Thelonious Sphere Monk) and "Bird" (the feature-length docudrama about the alto saxophonist who singlehandedly (with lots of help from Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell) revolutionized and expanded the horizons of American music in the mid-1940s. Finally, any viewer with sensitive ears must have noticed on the soundtrack of the Clint Eastwood-Meryl Streep soaper, "The Bridges of Madison County," the music of Johnny Hartman, Dinah Washington, John Coltrane and other American jazz greats. Eastwood, to boot, is father to a talented bassist son, Kyle. The American icon is indeed Dirty Harry--but with "big ears."]
[Finally, lest there be lingering suspicions that Mercer was a light-weight, this volume will surely dispel them. It's the heaviest book I've ever received from Amazon. In itself, a persuasive argument on behalf of Amazon Prime or the Kindle, take your pick.]
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I'm a Kind of Poet..., November 5, 2009
This review is from: The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer (Hardcover)
From "One for My Baby," (music by Harold Arlen)
"You'd never know it, but I'm a kind of poet, and I've got a lot of things to say."
Johnny Mercer was, indeed, a poet. And he had a lot of things to say.
In my mind there are 5 great lyricists of the golden age of songwriting: Larry Hart, Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin (yes, Berlin should be included), and Johnny Mercer. There are, perhaps others that could be on the list. Two that spring to my mind are Gus Kahn and Dorothy Fields (though Kahn's most memorable songs, "Nothing Could Be Finer," "It Had to Be You," and "Makin' Whoopee," came a bit earlier than the rest, and Fields, who wrote the lyrics to "The Sunny Side of the Street," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," and "The Way You Look Tonight" was at a disadvantage in a male-dominated industry).
But I've always felt that Johnny Mercer was the cream of the crop.
Why? After all, weren't Porter, Gershwin and Hart far more clever and sophisticated?
Perhaps, but I think that's primarily because Mercer took on, or perhaps was "assigned" the role of the southern rustic, not the Manhattan urbanite. After all, his first hit was "Lazybones," and one of his last, "Moon River," continued to mine that same rural southern vein.
Also, Mercer had a knack for not calling too much attention to his words. His view, I think, was that the lyric should serve the singer, not the lyricist. Porter and Hart and Ira Gershwin were sometimes prone to throwing a "look-how-clever-I-am" line into their songs now and again. Mercer rarely did. And when he succumbed to the temptation, it was usually in character, as in this line from "Fare-thee-well to Harlem:"
Things is tight in Harlem.
I knows how to fix-it:
Step aside, I'm gonna Mason Dix-it!
Fare-thee-well to Harlem, fare-thee-well!
"Mason-Dixit?" That's brilliant, yet doesn't draw attention away from the singer.
For my money one of the best lyrics Mercer ever wrote was for a rousing Broadway number titled, "The S.S. Commodore Ebenezer MacAfee the Third," written for the Broadway show/flop, FOXY, starring Bert Lahr. It was a vernacular piece, featuring a group of gold miners in Alaska. And yet the sophistication of the wordplay matches - perhaps even surpasses - anything Cole, Larry, or Ira ever penned. The fact that this great piece of songwriting has now been preserved here, in this wonderful new book, brings me no end of satisfaction. I used to have a cassette tape, given to me by a friend, that featured an early version of the score with Mercer himself singing the songs, and composer Robert Emmett Dolan (presumably) on piano. Now, in this collection, I find out that the lyric I had such admiration for was only a rough draft! Amazing!
However, one of the lyrics from FOXY, isn't in its complete form in the book. It's understandable, I suppose, since the song was apparently dropped from the score before opening night. But it should have been included. (It's one of my favorite Mercer songs.)
Here's that complete lyric (you can find a recording of it in Richard Rodney Bennett's CD, WAY AHEAD OF THE GAME, THE LYRICS OF JOHNNY MERCER): http://www.amazon.com/Way-Ahead-Game-Richard-Bennett/dp/B000088NTJ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1257523301&sr=1-1
"I'm Way Ahead of the Game"
Whatever comes up from here on in
I'm way ahead of the game.
Whatever comes up it's heads, I win.
I'm way ahead of the game.
I rolled a seven and locked up the store,
walked into heaven right through the front door.
Whatever comes up from here on out
I'll still be happy I came.
I had the kind of adventure I've read of
I'm way ahead of the game.
Lady luck, it's good-bye, hate to see you go.
Fireworks filled the sky; it was quite a show.
I just want to thank you for the free ride.
Out of all the others it was the ride.
(here's the missing verse)
Whatever comes up from here on in,
I'm way ahead of the game.
I'll still remember that big sweet grin
when he's forgotten your name.
We shared a fun kiss he'll never recall.
But better one kiss than no kiss at all.
Whatever comes up from here on out,
that kiss was my claim to fame.
Whatever comes up it's just like I said,
oh, I'm way ahead of the game.
My five favorite Mercer lyrics, "Fools Rush In," "I Thought About You," "Once Upon a Summertime," "Early Autumn," and "Emily," are exquisitely simple, and yet somehow convey so much more than the words themselves should be able to. That's true artistry.
Here's the entire lyric to "Emily," (music by Johnny Mandel).
Emily, Emily, Emily,
has the murmuring sound of May:
all silver bells and coral shells and carousels,
and the laughter of children at play,
say "Emily, Emily, Emily."
And we fade to a marvelous view:
two lovers alone and out of sight
seeing images in the firelight.
And as my eyes visualize a family
I see dreamily* Emily, too.
If you ask me, only Johnny Mercer had it in him to use a triple slant-rhyme (where the consonants rhyme but the vowels don't), and make it feel like pure poetry, yet conversational and off-the-cuff at the same time.
Is there a way I can give this book ten stars?
LCK
*(The line is mistakenly transcribed in the book as "I see dreamingly...," another minor error which in the overall context of this huge, daunting project, is easily forgiven, at least by me.)
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