https://www.amazon.com/You-Aint-My-Baby/dp/B01M27HBBO?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B01M27HBBO
composer lyricist musician singer
John Herndon Mercer was born on November 18, 1909 into a fairly well-to-do family in Savannah, Georgia. He was the son of George A. Mercer, a lawyer and real estate salesman whose ancestors had emigrated to the colonies from Scotland in 1747, and Lillian Ciucevich, the daughter of an Austrian merchant who settled in Savannah in the 1850's. Johnny had three older half-brothers from his father's first marriage, and one sister.
The Mercer boys were sent to Woodberry Forest School near Orange, Virginia, where Mercer seemed more interested in poetry and music than academics, writing his first song at age fifteen.
Upon graduation in 1927, Mercer worked briefly and unsuccessfully in his father's business, which by then was sinking as a result of an overall decline in real estate prices. George Mercer finally had to liquidate his assets and borrow $15, 000 to "stay off the charity rolls. " When he died in 1940 at age seventy-three he owed his creditors $300, 000. Mercer's mother wanted him to be an actor, and he joined the Savannah Little Theater in 1927 at her urging. Later that year, the group went to New York City to participate in the Belasco Cup, a one-act play competition, from which the group emerged with first prize. Mercer subsequently decided to remain in New York, making his Broadway debut in 1928 in Ben Jonson's Volpone, followed by other minor roles. He failed the audition for a singing part in the Garrick Gaieties of 1930, but succeeded in placing one of his songs in the show. Mercer moved to Brooklyn and Mercer divided his time between trying to make it as a songwriter and struggling to earn a living as a runner on Wall Street. Mercer was familiar with the work of other songwriters and poets. In the early 1930's he was fortunate to make the acquaintance of such noteworthy contemporaries as Yip Harburg, Vernon Duke, and Hoagy Carmichael. At first, Harburg served as a mentor, teaching him how to work a song to perfection, even if it required using Roget's Thesaurus and a rhyming dictionary. It was, however, Mercer's southern background, his ear for dialect, and his familiarity with such African-American forms as jazz and blues that gave his lyrics both charm and poignancy. In 1933 he released his first hit, "Lazybones, " for which Carmichael had provided the music. Shot through with authentic southern regionalism, it was quite a contrast to the mock-folksiness offered by New York songwriters. It was also in 1933 that Mercer began a two-year association with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, as a vocalist, emcee, and songwriter for Whiteman's radio program.
His growing success as a lyricist and recording artist, led to a songwriting and acting contract with RKO Studios, taking Mercer to Hollywood in 1935 to write songs for and appear in two pictures, Old Man Rhythm and To Beat the Band. Although Mercer never acted in another picture, he got a foothold in Hollywood as a songwriter with the 1936 hit "I'm an Old Cowhand". His songwriting work for the movie Hollywood Hotel (1937), which featured Benny Goodman's orchestra, led to his joining Goodman's "Camel Caravan" radio program as a vocalist. Other hit songs in the 1930's included "Goody, Goody" (1936) and "And the Angels Sing" (1939), both Goodman vehicles, as well as "Jeepers Creepers" (1938), inspired by actor Henry Fonda's midwestern twang, and "Day In, Day Out" (1939), another big-band favorite. During this period his collaborators included Richard Whiting, Harry Warren, Rube Bloom, and Jimmy Van Heusen, among others. Mercer said he preferred to work from an already composed melody, and the quality of his lyrics depended often on the quality of the material he was given. As he described it (in an oft-repeated story), he would sit at the typewriter and type dozens of alternative lines, then weed out the poor ones until he had what he wanted. Mercer's feeling for the rhythmic subtleties of jazz is unparalleled among Tin Pan Alley songwriters, and a large number of Mercer songs (such as "Skylark" and "Satin Doll") went on to become essential jazz vocal repertoire. His collaborations with Harold Arlen were particularly successful because Arlen was able to provide the requisite mixture of jazz and blues Mercer needed as a framework for his stories. Their first hit, "Blues in the Night" (1941), was so impressive that the producers of a movie it was to be featured in changed the title of the film (originally Hot Nocturne) to fit the song. Later collaborations with Arlen included "That Old Black Magic" (1942) and "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" (1943), a torch song that became inextricably associated with Frank Sinatra (much as Mercer's "Come Rain or Come Shine" became identified with Judy Garland and "Satin Doll" with Ella Fitzgerald). In 1942, Mercer (along with Glenn Wallichs and Buddy DeSylva) founded Capitol Records, where as president and talent scout he helped develop the careers of such major stars as Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, Stan Kenton, and Jo Stafford. While Mercer had no great interest in the record business as such, and later sold his interest in the company, the Capitol catalog remains a significant part of his legacy.
Although Mercer wrote the music for seven Broadway shows, none of them was a big hit. Most of his 1, 500 songs were written for the movies. The last of the great Tin Pan Alley songwriters, his career unfortunately was maturing just as the Broadway musical theater was changing its emphasis from "the song" to "the show, " a transition Mercer found difficult. In 1946 he and Arlen collaborated on St. Louis Woman, a black folk drama in the tradition of Porgy and Bess, but it closed after only 113 performances. Later efforts, even good shows such as Li'l Abner, were also relative flops, unable to compete with such new, plot-based musicals as South Pacific and Guys and Dolls. Hollywood also was in transition. As the studios gradually gave up producing original musicals in favor of remakes of successful Broadway shows, Mercer was relegated to writing "movie themes, " beginning with "Laura" in 1945 (although as late as 1954 he was writing material for an original musical film, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers). He shared Academy Awards for best song for his lyrics to "On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Sante Fe, " written with Harry Warren for The Harvey Girls (1946), and "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening, " written with Carmichael for Here Comes the Groom (1951). But Tin Pan Alley was rapidly fading; record sales had replaced sheet music as the major revenue source in popular music, and the market had moved toward rock and roll (and its antecedents, rhythm and blues and country) and the teenage consumer. As the market shifted, and the thirty-two-bar "A-A-B-A" format became less viable, songwriters like Mercer had an uphill climb. By the 1950's, Mercer was working without a collaborator, setting words to instrumentals such as "Autumn Leaves" (1950) and "Midnight Sun" (1954). Mercer died at his home in Bel-Air, eight months after undergoing brain surgery, from which he never recovered.
Mercer achieved pronounced success with movie themes, such as "Moon River" (1961) and "Days of Wine and Roses" (1962), both of which, with music composed by Henry Mancini, won Academy Awards. As late as 1965 a Mercer song, "Summer Wind, " could be seen at the top of the charts. His songs from this period exhibited a recurrent theme of wistful recollection of time past. Mercer was a reluctant melody-writer, perhaps because he lacked musical training, but he wrote words and music for a couple of musicals (Daddy Long Legs, Top Banana), as well as for a few hits ("Dream, " "I'm an Old Cowhand, " "Something's Gotta Give"). A dedicated craftsman, he traced his musical heritage back to the Englishman William S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan), but he will be remembered as the most American of songwriters, whose songs served as themes for such classic jazz and ballad singers as Billie Holiday, Sinatra, and Tony Bennett. Mercer won four Academy Awards on eighteen nominations for Best Original Song: "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe" (music by Harry Warren) for The Harvey Girls (1946), "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" (music by Hoagy Carmichael) for Here Comes the Groom (1951), "Moon River" (music by Henry Mancini) for Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), "Days of Wine and Roses" (music by Henry Mancini) for Days of Wine and Roses (1962). Mercer was also nominated for Best Original Song Score for the 1970 Mancini collaboration Darling Lili. In 1996, the United States Postal Service issued an American Commemoratives series stamp in his honor. He has a star on the Hollywood walk of fame at 1628 Vine Street.
Although capable of the urbane wordplay that flavored many Broadway hits of the era, Mercer was at his best when he reflected on images of small-town America (trains, back roads, front porches), and he was able to do so without being trite.
By all accounts a convivial fellow (who could become quite temperamental after a few drinks), Mercer liked to swim and paint watercolors, as well as play tennis and golf. He maintained a home in Savannah, Georgia, and an apartment in New York, but his main residence was in Los Angeles. In 1982 his widow donated a collection of memorabilia to Georgia State University in Atlanta, including all his published songs, photographs, letters, and awards.
On June 8, 1931 Mercer married Ginger Meehan. They had two children.
2 March 1868 - 14 November 1940
22 September 1881 - 9 September 1977
1 August 1915 - 8 October 2000
11 July 1911 - 11 May 1914
June 10, 1922 – June 22, 1969 Was an American singer, actress, dancer and vaudevillian.
25 June 1909 - 21 October 1994
