Wandering through music history.
Johnny Mercer’s Great American Songbook. He was a composer, lyricist, singer, record executive, won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture Song four times, and yet, his life ended on a low note.
His repertoire includes ‘One for My Baby’, ‘Blues in the Night’, ‘On the Atchison, Topeko and the Santa Fé’, ‘This Time the Dream’s on Me’, ‘Accentuate the Positive’, ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’.
The rise of pop music, with bands writing their own songs, meant that the great songwriters were no longer in demand in the 1960s, and Mercer could not sell his work either. “It’s embarrassing, I still write beautiful songs, but nobody wants to sing them anymore.”
How different it was in the decades before, when film producers begged him to make songs for their films. He was also a co-founder of the Capitol record label and not a bad singer.
Mercer was the only one of the great American songwriters who was born in the South and had “the South in his mouth”, which resulted in a charming rusticity in a lot of his work. Think of “Lazy Bones” or “The Summerwind”.
A Palace about the Magic of Mercer.
He can be heard in interpretations of Frank Sinatra, Roberta Gambarini, Madeleine Peyroux, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Shirley Horn, Chet Baker, Benny Goodman. His tombstone rightly bears the phrase: “And the Angels Sing.”
