Johnny Mercer

John Herndon Mercer was born on November 18, 1909, in Savannah, Georgia, where he spent his formative years absorbing the musical culture of the American South. His father, George Anderson Mercer, was a prominent attorney and real-estate developer, and his mother, Lillian Elizabeth, née Ciucevich, was the daughter of a Croatian immigrant father and a mother of Irish ancestry. Among his notable ancestors were Confederate General Hugh Weedon Mercer and American Revolutionary War General Hugh Mercer, a Scottish soldier-physician who died at the Battle of Princeton. Mercer was also a distant cousin of General George S. Patton. One of his earliest jobs, at age ten, was sweeping floors at the original 1919 location of Leopold's Ice Cream in Savannah.

Music entered Mercer's life at an exceptionally young age. His aunt recalled that he was humming tunes at six months old, and by age six he was singing in a choir. She took him to minstrel and vaudeville shows where he encountered ragtime and what were then called coon songs. His mother sang sentimental ballads, and his father favored old Scottish songs, both of which Mercer credited as early influences. As a child he had African-American playmates and servants and listened to fishermen and vendors who spoke and sang in the Gullah language, an exposure to Black music that was considered unusual among white songwriters of his generation. He was also drawn to Black church services. By age eleven or twelve he had memorized nearly every song he had heard and began wondering who had written them. When he asked his brother to name the best Tin Pan Alley songwriter, the answer was Irving Berlin.

Although Mercer hoped early on to become a composer, his talent proved to lie in lyric writing and singing rather than in playing instruments. His attempts at trumpet and piano were unsuccessful, and he never learned to read musical scores with ease, developing instead his own notation system. He was an avid reader and wrote adventure stories as a boy, and his time at the Woodberry Forest School in Virginia, which he attended until 1927, deepened his vocabulary through exposure to classic literature. At school he was active in literary and poetry societies and contributed humor writing to school publications. His yearbook noted his authority on jazz and his ability to evaluate orchestras and new productions. As a teenager during the Jazz Era he sought out recordings by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong. He also learned to dance from Arthur Murray himself during family trips to the mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, an experience he later commemorated in the song "Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry."

His family's ties to Princeton had pointed Mercer toward attending the university there, but his father's financial setbacks in the late 1920s ended those plans. After a period collecting rent and running errands for his father's recovering business, Mercer grew restless and moved to New York in 1928 at age nineteen. His first work there was as a bit actor, billed as John Mercer, and his Broadway performing career ran from 1928 to 1929. He secured a day job at a brokerage house and sang at night, living frugally in a Greenwich Village apartment. One evening he visited Eddie Cantor backstage to offer a comic song; Cantor did not use the song but began encouraging Mercer's career. His first published lyric, "Out of Breath (and Scared to Death of You)," written with composer Everett Miller, appeared in the 1930 revue The Garrick Gaieties. It was recorded by Joe Venuti and his New Yorkers. At that same show Mercer met chorus girl Ginger Meehan, whom he married in 1931 after obtaining a staff lyricist position at Miller Music for twenty-five dollars a week.

In 1932 Mercer won a contest to sing with the Paul Whiteman orchestra and made his recording debut on April 5 of that year, singing with Frank Trumbauer's Orchestra. He went on to become one of the most prolific and celebrated lyricists in American popular music, writing the words to more than 1,500 songs for films and Broadway productions. Among his most recognized songs are "Moon River," "Days of Wine and Roses," "Autumn Leaves," and "Hooray for Hollywood." He received nineteen Academy Award nominations for Best Original Song and won four of them. Beyond his work as a lyricist and singer, Mercer co-founded Capitol Records alongside Buddy DeSylva and Glenn E. Wallichs, establishing himself as a significant figure in the music industry as a record label executive as well.

His Broadway credits as composer, lyricist, and book writer span several productions, including Dream, Li'l Abner, Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939, Foxy, and Top Banana. His contributions to the Broadway stage earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Original Score in 1983. Johnny Mercer died on June 25, 1976.