Philip Furia's Top-Ten List of Johnny Mercer Songs

I spent part of this past weekend in Savannah, Georgia, attending a conference with two colleagues from the university. Among other things, that beautiful town is known for being the birthplace of Johnny Mercer, one of the wittiest, most idiosyncratic lyricists who ever contributed to the Great American Songbook, as well as a fine singer in his own right. So a few weeks ago I contacted Philip Furia, the author of the best biography of Mercer currently available, and asked him to send me a list of his top-ten favorite Johnny Mercer songs, along with some brief comments about each one. He graciously complied, and the result is the following article, for which I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to Mr. Furia.

Granted, I only spent two days in Savannah, mostly around the downtown area, but it was enough to realize what a lovely town it is, full of cultural activity and history, and the Johnny Mercer connection makes it even more attractive for someone who, like me, grew up fascinated by his very personal lyrics sung by legends such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday, among a myriad others. I became acquainted with Mercer as a songwriter first and was instantly attracted to his witty rhymes, his Southern inflections, and his penchant for telling a complete story set to music in just a few stanzas. That is the case with the late-night conversation between a client and a bartender in "One for My Baby," which is really a monologue, as the main character talks to a bartender who listens silently and never utters a comment. It is also the case with "I Thought About You," a train ride that offers the speaker a chance to reflect on the loss of love. Mercer is also a master when it comes to treating the universal subjects of romantic love, as in the open declaration of affection contained in "I Remember You," and unrequited love, as in "P.S. I Love You," a lyric written in the form of an unassuming love letter with just the right touch of sentimentality:

Dear, I thought I'd drop a line
The weather's good, the folks are fine
I'm in bed each night at nine
P.S., I love you.

Commemorative bench at Bonaventure Cemetery

Mercer was also a very interesting singer, who could handle sentimental numbers like "Candy" (with Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers), topical WWII ditties such as "I'm Gonna See My Baby" and "G.I. Jive," and even charming little novelties such as "Personality" with equal ease. In "One for My Baby," the protagonist tells the bartender, "You'd never know it / But, buddy, I'm a kind of poet," which seems to accurately describe Mercer's art itself. But Mercer is not just "a kind of poet" or a "poet of Tin Pan Alley," to borrow the title of one of Philip Furia's best books; he is a poet, without any other adjectives, one of the foremost American poets of the twentieth century. The fact that his lyrics were set to music, or that he wrote verses to fit musical compositions, is irrelevant. I am not going to say that all his lyrics read like poems, but they do not really have to—in many cases, they are inextricable from the melodies that accompany and complement them, and that is the way it should be. As Bing Crosby reminds us in his Musical Autobiography set, Mercer "is almost always strictly lyrics," but then his lyrics are always cleverly constructed and characterized by their wit and an unmistakable air of timelessness.

The most recommendable biography of Johnny Mercer currently available is, undoubtedly, Skylark: The Life and Times of Johnny Mercer (St. Martin's Press, 2003), written by Philip Furia, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who is the author of several studies of the Great American Songbook, as well as of many other biographies of some of the greatest American songwriters from the Golden Age. His book on Mercer is painstakingly researched and offers a thorough account of the complex life of its subject that is very entertaining to read. Mr. Furia began his research for the volume about twenty years ago, when he first moved to the South: "I was curious about Mercer," Mr. Furia says, "a southern songwriter among so many others who were New Yorkers." In many ways, despite his success, Mercer had a troubled personality that mixed the charm of a southern gentleman with occasional cruelty and aggressiveness, which made the subject at once attractive and difficult to understand for Mr. Furia. "When I started interviewing people in Savannah, and then in New York and California, I found there were so many awful stories about Johnny Mercer when he was drunk—including a pass at his own niece—that I had trouble writing about him," confesses the biographer. "A lucky meeting with William Goldman, the screenwriter (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, among other films), helped me resolve the problem by inserting myself and my mixed feelings about Mercer into the biography." And, indeed, those mixed feelings are apparent in the books, which is not merely a hagiography of Mercer, but a very balanced account of the life of a creative genius who was saddled with a personality full of contradictions. His biography, of course, is a definite must read for anyone interested in the Great American Songbook, classic pop, jazz, and twentieth-century American poetry.

Philip Furia's Top-Ten Johnny Mercer Songs

I asked Mr. Furia to name ten of his favorite Mercer compositions in no particular order, knowing that it would be a difficult task and totally aware that, if I were to ask him to do the same thing again in a few months or a few years, the list would probably look slightly different. Here are Mr. Furia's choices, along with the brief commentary he sent me about each song.

"One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)" (here, by Frank Sinatra) — It's unlike most other lyrics in that it creates a miniature drama with a setting, another character ("Set 'em up, Joe"), and a monologue by the main character. Next time I go to New York, I'm going to Pete's Bar and Grill, where Mercer supposedly wrote the lyric, apologizing to Pete as he left for not getting his name into the lyric because "Joe" worked better.

"That Old Black Magic" (here, by Sarah Vaughan) — It shows how Mercer took an idea from a songwriter he admired greatly (Cole Porter's "Do, do that voodoo that you do so well" in "You Do Something to Me") and built a whole new lyric around the idea of love as "black magic." I'll bet his lyric inspired Carolyn Leigh's for "Witchcraft."

"Too Marvelous for Words" (here, by Bing Crosby) — Mercer wrote this lyric under a lot of pressure when he was starting out in Hollywood. His collaborator, Richard Whiting, gave him a big dictionary for inspiration, and Mercer worked it into the lyric: "To ever be in Webster's dictionary."

"Skylark" (here, by Maxine Sullivan) — The lyric has those images of nature that Mercer, as one of the few non-New Yorker lyricists of his era, brought to songwriting from growing up in Savannah.

"Jeepers Creepers" (here, by Jack Teagarden & Johnny Mercer) — Mercer's love of slang comes out in all his lyrics but nowhere more than in this one: "peepers," "cheaters," meaning "sunglasses."

"Hooray for Hollywood" (here, by Doris Day) — A great send-up of a town he loved and hated: "where you're terrific if you're even good."

"Autumn Leaves" (here, by Nat King Cole) — A bone-simple English lyric to a gorgeous French melody with great "d" sounds: "Drift by my window / The autumn leaves / Of red and gold . . . The sunburned hands / I used to hold." What an ear he had!

"Days of Wine and Roses" (here, by Andy Williams) — Haunting images of loss: "Toward a closing door, a door marked nevermore, that wasn't there before." Up there with T.S. Eliot's "East Coker."

"Satin Doll" (here, by Ella Fitzgerald & Duke Ellington) — Elegant and slangy: "Cigarette holder / which wigs me / over her shoulder / she digs me . . . speaks Latin / my satin doll."

"Laura" (here, by Dick Haymes) — Great, mysterious imagery: "And you see Laura / on a train that is passing through / those eyes, how familiar they seem."

Conversations with Donald Clarke (I) - Clarke's Biography of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby's Influence on Sinatra

Author Donald Clarke

As I already mentioned in a previous article, Donald Clarke's All or Nothing at All: A Life of Frank Sinatra has always been one of my favorite biographies ever written on Ol' Blue Eyes, not only because of its very direct, dynamic style, but also because Mr. Clarke attempts to reconcile Sinatra the man and Sinatra the musician. Although I have read other Sinatra biographies and studies (some excellent, some good, and some plainly trashy) I often come back to Mr. Clarke's book (and to Will Friedwald's Sinatra! The Song Is You as well) and reread passages or whole chapters that invariably offer new perspectives on Sinatra's life and work. Some months ago I contacted Mr. Clarke asking him for an interview for The Vintage Bandstand, and he kindly agreed. But each question that I asked him promptly elicited many more, and so we have been corresponding via e-mail intermittently for the past several months, and I have so much interesting material that I have decided to begin a series of articles culled from our e-mail exchanges. As long as Mr. Clarke finds our correspondence stimulating enough, these Conversations with Donald Clarke will be an ongoing series, and I hope the readers consider his perspectives on Sinatra and jazz in general as enlightening as I do. In this first installment of the series, Mr. Clarke and I discuss his book on Frank Sinatra, as well as the influence that Bing Crosby exerted on The Voice in the formative period when he was still Young Blue Eyes.

Donald Clarke, who has also published a biography of Billie Holiday and the study The Rise and Fall of Popular Music, has edited the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, and runs the very recommendable website Donald Clarke's Music Box (where you can find the Encyclopedia in its entirety for free), was born in 1940 and grew up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a place "where there is no there," as he himself puts it. After working in a car factory for ten years and then attending college, he decided to travel to Great Britain to teach in a primary school. At first it was going to be just ten weeks, but he wound up staying in Britain for twenty-five years! He returned to the United States in 1998 and now lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with his wife of 34 years, "a very successful magazine editor-in-chief" who works for Organic Garden magazine. He has three children, four grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren and considers himself now "the luckiest man in the world." Music has always been his great passion, which is something that we both share, and so without further ado, let us turn now to the beginning of our first conversation, made out of excerpts of our recent electronic correspondence.

Anton Garcia-Fernandez (for The Vintage Bandstand): When I first saw your book on Sinatra, All or Nothing at All, on the shelves of the bookstore Shakespeare & Co., in Paris, France, I was struck by its subtitle, "A Life of Frank Sinatra." This seemed to imply that this was a fresh, personal take on Sinatra's life, about which so much had been written over the years. It was, so to speak, your life of Frank Sinatra. Was that your intention as you sat down to write the book? In other words, with so much in print about Sinatra, what new perspective on his life were you hoping to bring to the fore with your book?

Mr. Clarke: Yes, the title was chosen carefully. Somebody once wrote that "There is no such thing as an autobiography, not even an autobiography," meaning, I take it, that in order to tell you my life story, I would also have to tell you the life stories of all of my ancestors, everybody I have ever known, etc. Similarly, there will be as many biographies of Sinatra as people willing to write them. The last one I looked at had the author pretending to be a fly inside the limousine quoting Frank and Barbara having a squabble, as though he had been there with a notebook. I didn't have a new perspective, but I've read enough lousy biographies so that what I wanted to write was the book that I would want to read if I were looking for a book about Sinatra, covering both the life and the music. I think I have a knack for telling the reader what he or she wants to know without patronizing anybody. So, yes, it is my life of Sinatra, and I wasn't afraid to put myself in it.

Another aspect is that if Sinatra hadn't been a singer, as I wrote in the book, he might have been a New Jersey plumbing contractor, and we never would have heard of him unless he got arrested. In other words, at some level he must have been an ordinary guy. This was after I had written the Billie Holiday book and I realized that what I was really writing about was the problem of being an American in the twentieth century.

Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby

TVB: At some point in the book, you mention that Sinatra became an incredibly popular, if often controversial, public figure, when all he had originally set out to do was to follow in the footsteps of his idol, Bing Crosby. Bing was certainly an innovator in many ways, not only as a vocalist but also as a businessman. In what ways do you think Sinatra was an innovator as well, both in music and in business? Or, in other words, in what ways did he improve upon Crosby's foundation?

Mr. Clarke: I enjoyed Crosby's work, but I was never that big a fan. I heard him in the late 1940s and onward, and was surprised many years later to hear some of his earlier records, when he wasn't so relaxed, or maybe the white pop music style was different in the 1930s. I believe that whites were learning from blacks in the jazz era, but that they didn't really master the idiom until after WWII. There are more of Crosby's recordings I would like to hear -- there's a big compilation of radio broadcasts on Mosaic that he made in the 1950s with a small jazz group. But for me his innovation was not so much interpreting songs as the fact that he was influenced by jazz, and also knew how to use a microphone, so that he became the first modern recording vocalist, with Louis Armstrong. So Crosby was good for Sinatra to learn from, but there was an immediate difference: Crosby wanted to be your boyfriend; Sinatra wanted to be your lover.

Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald

TVB: What was it exactly about Sinatra's sound that attracted you upon first hearing? I have been trying to define what it was for me for years now, and every time I try, for some reason, I can't quite put my finger on it... As a matter of fact, his biggest hits as Young Blue Eyes on Columbia were ballads, weren't they? What do you think about that? To what extent can we say that Sinatra was a jazz singer?

Mr. Clarke: A combination of things. First of all, the sound of his voice was attractive. Then there was the honesty he bragged about. When he was singing, there was no artifice. Also, he sang ballads or uptempo, and it doesn't matter if he was a jazz singer. I think I said in the book that he was not, but I would say now that we can call him a jazz singer, "if the essence of jazz singing is to make the familiar sound fresh, and to make a lyric come alive with personal meaning," which is something I wrote about Billie Holiday. The other day I happened to hear Ella Fitzgerald singing "This Year's Kisses," and it wasn't a patch on Holiday's version. Then I recalled that Ella had said that singing a song was like telling a beautiful story that happened to somebody else. Much as I admire Ella, when you heard Holiday or Sinatra singing a song, you knew they were telling you something about themselves. And that's what a great jazz musician does.

TVB: And to finish with Crosby's influence on Sinatra, there is a passage of your book where you say that at some point Crosby allegedly advised Sinatra not to rely too heavily on just one arranger, a piece of advice that, from your point of view, was a mistake. However, couldn't we say that if Sinatra were to rely on one arranger alone, that would inevitably lend an air of sameness to his recordings? For example, I feel that George Siravo's arrangements for Sinatra toward the end of his tenure with Columbia are a breath of fresh air after several years of Axel Stordahl's string arrangements, as beautifully lyrical as Stordahl's work is. What do you think about that?

Mr. Clarke: If I disagreed with Crosby, I was wrong. I was probably wishing that Sinatra had made all his records after 1953 with Nelson Riddle. The Siravo records were a welcome change from Stordahl, but I find them studio-bound. This question has partly to do with the playing of white bands as opposed to the black masters of jazz. The white studio arrangers and musicians had improved immeasurably by the mid-1950s, in my opinion. Also, bands which were on the road, like Tommy Dorsey's around 1940, learned how to breathe and think together, as opposed to ad hoc studio groups, which also improved post WWII.

And that is it for the first installment. I would like to thank Mr. Clarke for his kindness in addressing all these questions, as well as for his giving freely of his time. More installments in this series of Conversations with Donald Clarke will be forthcoming!

'Swing and Dance with Frank Sinatra,' a Columbia LP arranged by George Siravo

Bandstand Christmas Essentials 2: Ella Fitzgerald's Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas

The second installment in our series of Bandstand Christmas Essentials takes a look at one of the most swinging seasonal albums ever recorded—Ella Fitzgerald's Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas, produced by Norman Granz and arranged and conducted by Frank DeVol. Ella is in top form, the studio orchestra provides some very inspired backing, and the song choices offer a few surprises. The result is a holiday album that oozes with jazz and sounds extremely fun.

Throughout her long and prolific career, Ella Fitzgerald recorded comparatively few Christmas songs. A quick look at her vast discography reveals that Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas, a full-length album that she cut for Verve in 1960, is her most satisfying seasonal offering. Like Dean Martin's A Winter Romance, this is not exactly a traditional Yuletide record, although the song selection definitely includes more straight-ahead Christmas songs than Dino's Capitol classic. The anonymous original liner notes of the album actually underscore this fact:

Mindful that Christmas albums normally emphasize the religious and the solemn, Ella chose in this to stress the festive aspect of the season; hence the latitude employed in the selection of material. As if to ask: Why not the peace and good will of Christmas the year 'round?

And, as the title of the collection suggests, Ella's Christmas is not only merry and cheerful but also swinging. This is so, in part, because of Frank DeVol's hip yet unobtrusive arrangements, which help Ella sound as cool as it is possible in this type of album. But it is also due to Fitzgerald's love for this kind of material: she is obviously having a good time with these tunes, often improvising on the melodies, which results in a much more enjoyable finished product. The best example of this is, in fact, the most surprising choice, Count Basie and Jimmy Rushing's "Good Morning Blues," a song that one usually does not find in a seasonal album but that somehow seems tailor-made for Ella's swinging Christmas theme. The rest of the repertoire is much more predictable, including evergreens such as "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!," and of course, Irving Berlin's "White Christmas." But DeVol's jazzy charts are a breath of fresh air, and they certainly bring out the best in Ella, whose voice is in the finest of forms. Even the vocal group used on some of the tracks does not sound stale and annoying but is a welcome addition to the arrangement.

Arranger Frank DeVol

DeVol also leaves room for some interesting solos, such as the trumpet on "White Christmas" and the piano on "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer." The latter even has Ella quoting from The Kingston Trio's folk hit "Tom Dooley," and on "Jingle Bells," when she sings about those jingle bells jingling all the way, she does not only make the bells jingle, but swing all the way. A couple of slower ballads, Mel Torme's "The Christmas Song" and Frank Loesser's "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?," are good for a slight change of pace and rank among the highlights of a very recommendable LP. The twelve tracks on the original album were reissued on CD in 1988 featuring only the brief 1960 liner notes and no information regarding the personnel of the sessions, but in 2002 it was repackaged and reissued with a few bonus tracks and detailed notes written by Will Friedwald. While it is too bad that Ella did not record much more Christmas music (her Capitol Christmas album finds her backed by a string orchestra, but it would have been nice if she had done something in a small-group jazz setting, for instance) this album is top-notch Yuletide fare and definitely does deliver on its promise of wishing the listener a swinging Christmas.

Cover of the 2002 second CD reissue