Mercer latched on to a hit

THE JOHNNY MERCER EDUCATIONAL ARCHIVES

Mercer latched on to a hit

MUSIC

Mercerizing Johnny

The term mercerizing is most commonly understood to refer to the treatment of cotton goods with caustic soda to impart a permanent high luster. -Encyclopedia Britannica

Musical mercerizing is essentially the same process: Take a good tune and get Johnny Mercer to write the lyrics. Permanent high luster is almost always the result. Remember "Lazy Bones"? That was one of the first mercerized hits. Hoagy Carmichael had a tune he called "Snowball." Doctored by his friend Mercer, it became "Lazy Bones," a 1933 epidemic. Since then, hardly a year has passed without a Mercer hit or two-or three and even four. Take 1938. That year produced "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby," "Girl Friend of the Whirling Dervish," and "Jeepers Creepers." In 1942, Mercer came up with "That Old Black Magic," "Skylark," "Tangerine,' "The Waiter, and the Porter, and the Upstairs Maid," and "Strip Polka."

Made-in-a-Minute Hits: For the last two songs, incidentally, Mercer wrote both tune and lyrics, "but usually," he explains, "I stick to the lyrics and let some other fella pound out the music." "I'm an Old Cowhand" (1936) and "G.I. Jive" (1943) were also exceptions. "I'm an Old Cowhand" was written for Bing Crosby, a great Mercer fan, and "G.I. Jive" happened when Mercer remembered-but not until rehearsal-that he had promised to write a tune for a radio show.

Johnny mercerizes by fits and starts but almost always at the last minute. He wrote "Goody Goody" (1936) in less than an hour when he was in the hospital. His latest success, written with Harold Arlen, took up a brief afternoon. He and Arlen needed a novelty number to finish off their score for "Here Come the Waves." Mercer remembered an old expression, "Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative." "With a beginning like that," he says, "the rest of it practically wrote itself":

You've got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive,
   E-lim-my-nate the negative,
   Latch on to the affirmative,
   Don't unless with Mister In-Between.*

The tune is a hallelujah-like spiritual, sung off-beat. By last week Mercer's own Capitol record of "Ac-cent-tchu-ate" had already passed the 300,000 mark and was among the top three best-selling records. Publishers of the sheet music reported that the song was "running away.

Reputation and all, Mercer is only 35. He was born in Savannah , Ga. -a fact nobody can miss when he sings ("recitation in rhythm" was what Paul Whiteman once called his flat-voiced, sing-song delivery). At 15, be had already written his first song: "Sister Susie, Strut Your Stuff." He also wanted to be an actor, but when he tried out for a show, he sold a song instead-"Out of Breath and Scared to Death of You." After working as a Wall Street runner, he auditioned with Whiteman as a singer. Whiteman gave him a job and began to plug his songs. Then came "Lazy Bones" and soon after that Hollywood .

Love's Together: Those who know Mercer will 1et-him drift in and out of their lives as he pleases. A shy, quiet type of pixie, he is never satisfied with work and gets discouraged easily. He lives in a modest white bungalow, where he often entertains friends like Nunnally Johnson, Harold Arlen, David Hempstead, Robert Emmett Dolan by sitting at the piano with his eyes almost closed. At the end of the evening he sometimes curls up and goes to sleep under the piano.

All evidences of whimsy to the contrary, however, Mercer is a good businessman and a marvelous picker of talent. But preeminently, he is a song mercerizer. His trade recognizes that he is unique among them. The recipe? "Take a current situation," he explains, "and write a few catchy lyrics about it, and then set those to a fast swinging tune' Pick a subject that everybody's talking about. Like the Army. Or rationing. In a, pinch, you can always use love-but -that's tougher.

1944 - Edwin H. Morris Co., Inc.

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