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Mercer Centennial Attests to Legacy
The centennial celebrations for Johnny
Mercer’s birth this year put him in good company,
as 2009 will honor the centennials of
Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Lester Young
and Ben Webster. The Mercer events should
serve as reminders of how much he achieved
using just his voice and a pen.
The Mercer centennial actually kicked off on
Nov. 16, 2008, with a birthday concert in the
Johnny Mercer Theater of the Savannah Civic
Center in Georgia. The Johnny Mercer
Foundation has a lot more planned for 2009.
“There will be a book of Mercer’s work
complied by Robert Kimball,” said Mercer
Foundation Executive Director Frank Scardino.
“It’s expected by summer and will cover his
collaborations with Harold Arlen, Henry
Mancini, Duke Ellington and many others.
Clint Eastwood is serving as executive producer
of a documentary [directed by Bruce Ricker]
on Mercer’s career. The expectation is that it
will be part of the ‘American Masters’ series
this year on PBS.”
Along with Mercer Foundation events, the
Savannah Music Festival in Georgia, which runs
from March 19–April 5, is featuring concerts
and educational programs surrounding the composer.
The festival also commissioned saxophonist
Ted Nash to devise a new arrangement
for Mercer’s “Blues In The Night.”
A great song, such as that one, reinvents itself
in perpetuity. Scardino said that the foundation’s
health attests to how enduring Mercer’s compositions
have been.
Johnny
Mercer
“Half of the revenues that are generated by
the Mercer estate go to the foundation,”
Scardino said. “More than 30 years after his
death, his music provides the funds that permit
us to do all the charitable works and educational
programs that we sponsor. In recent years the
charities alone have received approximately
$500,000 annually from the foundation.”
Scardino points out that “Dream” was in the
soundtrack of the film Miss Pettigrew Lives For
A Day. “Trav’lin’ Light” and “Blues In The
Night” are the title songs of recent CDs from
Queen Latifah and Ann Hampton Callaway, and
“Moon River” is featured in a current
MasterCard ad campaign.
“Mercer’s songs still have an impact on people’s
lives,” Scardino said. “That’s a legacy that
will live on through new singers. Part of the
Foundation’s mission is to propagate the Great
American Songbook, because generations to
come will know that something was written in
another time can have just as much meaning as
something contemporary.”
The songs began in the 1930s. Mercer the
performer also made Mercer the songwriter a
celebrity and a personality. His picture often
appeared on his own sheet music, a rare distinction
for a simple tunesmith. In a time when few
composers had either the audacity or the talent to
sing their own songs, Mercer had both.
His singing was genial, self-deprecating and
colloquial. In the ’30s, Mercer recorded with
Paul Whiteman, Goodman and Bing Crosby.
The rapport with Crosby was deliciously conversational,
but Mercer’s words didn’t stop with
Crosby. Today, one doesn’t have to rack the
memory for lines like “set ’em up, Joe,” “P.S. I
love you” or even the jive-laced “dig you in the
land of nod.” They were part of the common
vernacular long before he picked and planted
them perfectly in a sequence of tones. More
important, younger singers still perform them.
Once such singer is Daryl Sherman, who has
a Mercer collection, tentatively titled Jeepers
Creepers!, coming out this summer on Arbors.
“So many of Mercer’s lyrics reflect his boyhood
in Georgia with images of peach trees and
huckleberries,” Sherman said. “It was his ear for
the vernacular, that gave his work such personality.
He favored wide vowel sounds and he used
onomatopoeia: His words were visual and colorful.
But, for a singer, they phrase in a conversational
way.”
—John McDonough
SHORE FIRE MEDIA
The ARCHIVES
March 23,
1955
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the last couple of years that
appears to be going somewhere,
sees the current boom in
the rhythm & blues market as
something that will just have to
run its course like an epidemic.
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hurry,” Elgart said. “It ceases
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By Nat Hentoff
“Those people who heard
Jimmy Blanton only on records
never really got to hear what he
could do, as good as the
records were,” bassist Wendell
Marshall said. “When he had a
chance to play at a session for
an hour running, he really
turned loose.”
Negro TV, Radio Jobs
Almost Nil, Survey Finds
By Hannah Altbush
“We found one or two Negro
musicians who are employed
regularly on the networks,” said
Odell Clark, vice president of the
New York branch of the
National Association for the
Advancement of Colored
People. “But outside of guest
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bigger names, a Negro musician
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Latin Americana
By Oliver Berliner
I always have believed in leaving
Latin music to the Latins.
Although I favor anything that
will make this music more popular
to John Doe, even if it takes
an American band to do it, I still
feel that only a Latin band can
interpret this music properly. DB
16 DOWNBEAT March 2009