Johnny Mercer at 100

You’re about to read my old friend Michael Ackerman say that Johnny Mercer was the best American songwriter of all times. But if that’s true why isn’t he a household word? All Belgians have heard of Jacques Brel and all Brits have heard of Paul McCartney. Mercer was not a pop star; he was someone mostly behind the scenes who wrote many of the standards you find in those big books of Broadway and film show tunes. You’ve heard many of his songs: “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” “Hooray for Hollywood” and “Moon River.” In other words, the songs you thought were around forever. And you’ve played lots of records published by Capitol Records, which he founded. Everything has a beginning.

I tend to be ignorant of culture, but it’s not just me; his birth data isn’t listed in Astrotheme, or even Astrodatabank. But — now we know. And today happens to be the 100th anniversary of his birth. I discovered this while simultaneously gabbing with Michael and googling yesterday morning.

Really, there is no explaining someone with this kind of unusual talent astrologically; my preference is to look to his chart for information about astrology itself. (And we do learn something about the cardinal signs, something we already knew.) It would be great if we had his birth time; putting his planets into houses would be a big help toward helping us have a clear picture of who he is. But we do have planets in signs: here’s a bit:

Mercer was a Scorpio with an Aquarius Moon (Neil Young has this configuration, which provides intellect and emotional capacity in equal measure). His outer planets are in signs distinctly unfamiliar to most astrologers today — Pluto in Gemini, Neptune in Cancer, opposite Uranus in Capricorn — exactly opposite, to one degree, which to me is his songwriting aspect. True, everyone was born with this doorway in their chart in that era; Johnny Mercer came through the door.

In 1909, Eris was still in Pisces, conjunct Nessus; when Mercer was born, Mars was there too, and it’s in the last degree of Pisces — the degree of the shapeshifter. Pisces is one of the places you look to for musical talent, and this is an odd mix but it’s an energy source, and the imagery fits. Many people experience Nessus as the dark side, and many songs are about the woes of life.

He had Capricorn: Uranus, Vesta, Venus and Pallas in that sign, which is business acumen; and Jupiter in Libra opposite Saturn in Aries, aaah — which happens to square the Uranus-Neptune opposition — so he had the cardinal signs fully activated, which is energy, innovation and public contact.

Here is an interesting bit out of his Wikipedia entry: Mercer’s exposure to black music was perhaps unique among the white songwriters of his generation. As a child, Mercer had African-American playmates and servants, and he listened to the fishermen and vendors about him, who spoke and sang in the Creole dialect known as “Geechee”. He was also attracted to black church services. Mercer later stated, “Songs always fascinated me more than anything”. He never had formal musical training but was singing in a choir by six and at eleven or twelve he had memorized almost all of the songs he had heard and he had become curious about who had written them. He once asked his brother who the best songwriter was, and his brother said Irving Berlin is among the best of Tin Pan Alley.

{Bruce Springsteen disagrees on that particular point — he once pointed out that Woodie Guthrie felt that “God Bless America” is a bit of nationalist propaganda. Guthrie wrote “This Land is Your Land” in an angry reply.) However, I digress…

I will post Mercer’s chart below, which by the way is not based on a real birth time; it’s my best guess. Here’s what my friend Michael, a lawyer who plays guitar, bass and drums, has to say about Mercer.

Johnny Mercer was the greatest American songwriter who ever lived. Yes, arguably even better than Bob Dylan.  Because Mercer died over thirty years ago and started writing hit songs in the 1930s, many are not well versed in his work today.  Yet his songs helped define popular music from the 1940s through the early 1960’s and are still some of the most performed and beloved standards today.

You may think you’re unfamiliar with Johnny Mercer or his music but actually you probably know more of his work and his creations than you’d think.  If you grew up watching Looney Tunes, as I did, you surely know “You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby” or “Jeepers Creepers” or “Blues in the Night” (the vulture who sings “My mama done told me, bring home something for dinner” is sung to the tune of Blues in the Night’s opening lines).  If you’ve seen the film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” you’ve heard Mercer’s song “Moon River.”  Surely everyone knows “Hooray for Hollywood,” Mercer wrote the lyrics for that.

If you ever saw Sammy Davis, Jr. perform, he almost certainly performed his classic version of “That Old Black Magic” which Mercer wrote. My own first dance at my wedding was to the tune of “Come Rain or Come Shine,” a Mercer composition, which was used as the theme of the Scorcese film “The King of Comedy” (as performed brilliantly by Ray Charles) and was a “turntable hit” at radio in the early 1990’s as performed by Don Henley (from MTV Unplugged).

Chances are you were sung to sleep by someone at some point with Mercer’s lovely “Hit the Road to Dreamland.” Or you might have seen the Clint Eastwood movie “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” about Savannah, Georgia (Mercer’s hometown) which featured Mercer as a songwriter and as a presence.  Certainly, you’re familiar with Capitol Records, home of the Beatles, Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, Steve Miller, Pink Floyd and Bob Seger among many others — Mercer was the founder of the company.

That’s sort of the tip of iceberg. As if that’s not enough, Mercer wrote the greatest saloon song ever. As popularized by Frank Sinatra, “One for My Baby (and One More For The Road)” clearly comes from the age before the breathalyzer. In Mercer’s time, men buried their sorrows in drink (ever see an episode of “Mad Men”?) and the protagonist in “One for My Baby” is no exception, telling his tale of broken-hearted woe to Joe, the bartender.  To me the great thing about the song, and most of Mercer’s songs, is its conversational tone.  It never feels forced into rhyme, but the language lilts and rolls out very naturally, and if you’ve ever tried to write a song you know how difficult that can be.

Mercer was perhaps the king of the novelty song.  “Save the Bones for Henry Jones,” a hit for the Mills Brothers, describes a banquet meal where there’s everything but you’re warned to “save the bones, for Henry Jones because Henry don’t eat no meat.”  “Jeepers Creepers,” perhaps best known in the Louis Armstrong version, sprang from a slang phrase popular at the time which was, in essence, a substitute for saying “Jesus Christ.”

Maybe you know the Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers version of “Goody Goody,” Mercer wrote that too.  It’s an amazing song which predates Dylan’s making bitterness  a mainstream subject in popular music—“So you met someone who set you back on your heels, goody goody, so you met someone and now you know how it feels, goody goody,” all set to a bouncy feel good melody  Perhaps my favorite Mercer song, and that says a lot, is “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” in which you’re told to ”eliminate the negative.”  Mercer perfectly captured the positive feel of the music and this is the song I listen to to lift my spirits when they need lifting.  It’s like bottled happiness.

But Mercer not only wrote novelty songs, he wrote classics like “Summer Wind,” “Satin Doll” (he added the lyrics after the tune was a hit for Duke Ellington) and “Glow Worm.”  A personal favorite of mine is Mercer’s “I’m an Old Cowhand,” which might be corny when sung by a movie cowboy, but as performed by the saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins on his “Way Out West” album, is the swingingest of jazz tunes (and Mercer wrote not only the lyrics to this song but the melody as well).  Mercer’s and Hoagy Carmichael’s  “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” similarly is a great marriage of lyric and melody producing the consummate swinging jazz tune.  Mercer often wrote for films, which is one of the reasons his songs were so popular (so many people went to the cinema in that era that millions heard his songs even without radio airplay) and his songs “The Days of Wine and Roses” and the “Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” (the latter magnificently performed by Judy Garland).

It’s Johnny Mercer’s one hundredth birthday today so it’s the perfect time to familiarize yourself with a uniquely American treasure, the life and work of Johnny Mercer.