Phil Furia
from Skylark: The Life and Times of Johnny Mercer
TO OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN, Johnny Mercer was "the most perfect American
lyricist alive. American. Pure American." To Yip Harburg, who grew up in
wretched poverty on the Lower East Side but went on to write "Over the
Rainbow," Johnny Mercer was "one of our great folk poets," whose lyrics had
their roots in the prose of Mark Twain and the songs of Stephen Foster. "Mercer
had an ability to write from roots different from mine," said Hal David. Even
though David has penned such folksy lyrics as "Raindrops Keep Falling on My
Head" and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" he envied Mercer's regional
roots: "He was southern. I am Brooklyn. And he created the most wonderful
images. He wrote lyrics I wish I could write, but I knew I couldn't because I came
from a different base." Another New York writer, Alec Wilder, once visited
Mercer at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. As Wilder got out of his
cab, he saw Mercer in the backyard, feeding the birds. "Good God," Wilder
thought, "the man who wrote 'Mr. Meadowlark,' 'Bob White,' and 'Skylark' really
does love birds."
What also set Mercer apart from his fellow songwriters was his successful
career as a singer, a harbinger of songwriters, such as Paul Simon and Bob Dylan
who perform their own songs. While Mercer was a consummate interpreter of his
own works, however, he preferred to sing the songs of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern,
and others he had loved as a boy. He sang with Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman,
and other big bands on numerous radio programs (including some of his own
shows) and, in later years, on television. As a singer, he could interact with
performers as other songwriters could not, and he recorded songs with singers as
varied as Judy Garland, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby and Bobby Darin. As a radio
singer in the 1940s, Johnny Mercer became a household name, and that saved him
from the relative oblivion to which most lyricists are consigned by a public that
usually associates a song with its composer. "Gershwin," to most people, means
George Gershwin, even though it was his brother Ira's lyrics that made many a
"Gershwin tune" memorable. Mrs. Oscar Hammerstein, so the story goes, grew so
tired of composers overshadowing lyricists that when she heard someone refer to
"Ol' Man River" as a great "Kern" song, she said, "Jerome Kern did not write 'Ol'
Man River.' Mr. Kern wrote 'dum dum dum da.' My husband wrote 'Ol' Man
River.'"
While people never refer to a "Hammerstein" song or a "Harburg" song,
they do speak of a "Johnny Mercer song," making Mercer the only lyricist from a
generation of brilliant wordsmiths to identify himself with his songs in the public
imagination.
from Sinatra in Drag
LIKE MOST PEOPLE I KNOW, I first listened to the great standards of Cole
Porter, Rodgers & Hart, the Gershwins, and the other lyricists and composers of
what's been called "The Golden Age of American Song" on the albums Frank
Sinatra made in the 1950s.† Now, after studying those songs and songwriters for
nearly twenty years, I have to ask myself, had Sinatra not recorded "I've Got You
Under My Skin," "I Wish I Were In Love Again," and many other great songs,
would they even be standards today? Such songs came from largely forgotten
Broadway musicals of the 1920s and '30s.
While it's pretty to think that artistry triumphs over time, many beautifullycrafted songs from other musicals of this era have been relegated to period-pieces.†
Familiar only to scholars and "show tune" buffs, they are performed, if at all, in
historically "correct" reconstructions by teams like William Bolcom and Joan
Morris rather than the updated, swinging versions Sinatra gave them.† Songwriters
might cavil at Sinatra's cavalier changes of melodies and lyrics (Cole Porter
supposedly once fumed, "Mr. Sinatra, if you don't like my songs as I wrote them,
please don't sing them"), but his jazzy renditions of these songs, with arrangers
such as Nelson Riddle and Billy May, turned them into classics.
If Sinatra did well by these songs, they, in turn, did a lot for him.† In his
magisterial Sinatra: The Song Is You, Will Friedwald traces the nadir of Sinatra's
career in the early 1950s when he was regarded as an over-the-hill bobby-soxer
idol.† At Columbia Records, where the gimmicky Mitch Miller had taken charge,
Sinatra was given such poor fare to record that at one session he reportedly looked
at the lead sheet and announced, "I'm not singing this crap."
To be sure, they weren't many good songs by the early 1950s. What Irving
Berlin, Ira Gershwin, and other songwriters had predicted back in the 1930s was
finally coming true: radio, with its incessant playing of "hits" was wearing out a
song's popularity so quickly that the quality of songwriting was deteriorating as
composers and lyricists rushed to fill radio's voracious appetite.
After Columbia let Sinatra go (or, as he put it, "I fired Columbia") in 1953,
he was given a second chance by Capitol, the only record company that, at that
point, still believed in artistry. Founded in 1941 by songwriters Johnny Mercer and
Buddy DeSylva, along with businessman Glen Wallichs, Capitol developed such
talents as Peggy Lee, Jo Stafford, and Nat King Cole and rigorously refused to
"cover" hits by other companies with their own singers. Capitol's gamble on
Sinatra came at a critical moment in the history of American song. 1954, the year
of his first recordings for them, saw the emergence of rock-and-roll with Bill Haley
and the Comet's "Rock Around the Clock." That same year Elvis Presley cut his
first records in Memphis.
The record industry was changing mechanically as well as stylistically.
Instead of the standard 78 rpm records, two newer formats had established
themselves. The 45 rpm record, developed in 1948, was aimed at a newly affluent
teenage market, giving them a song on each side for less than a dollar. The "longplaying" LP record had been developed as far back as 1931, but not until the
1950s did recording and "high fidelity" players make it a feasible product. At first,
LPs were confined to classical music and a distinctively "adult" audience, but soon
popular singers from the pre-rock era were making "concert" albums of twelve or
more songs.
Throughout the 1950s, Sinatra cut both LPs and 45s. His 45 singles would
feature such contemporary songs as "Young At Heart" and "Hey! Jealous Lover,"
but for his LPs he turned to a very different repertoire. Like most popular singers,
he had always recorded new songs. Very few performers--most notably singer Lee
Wiley and bandleader Artie Shaw--had consciously sought out older songs. But the
LP format required a large body of songs and given the paucity of artistic quality in
contemporary songwriting Sinatra turned to songs of the 1920s and '30s.
Sammy Cahn claimed to have been instrumental in leading Sinatra to the
gems of Porter, Rodgers & Hart, and other great lyricists and composers.
Instinctively, Sinatra must have been drawn to songs written for Broadway
musicals, which were tailored to a particular character in a particular dramatic
situation. These he could turn into what he called "saloon songs," where he
"became" the character delineated in the lyric and acted out a miniature drama in
the course of his performance. With the new "high fidelity" recording equipment,
Sinatra, who always claimed that his "instrument" was the microphone, could
build in subtle nuances of emotion as he "read" a lyric.
What is most striking about the older songs Sinatra chose for his Capitol
albums is that many of them were written for women performers in stage and
screen musicals. Women were usually given a wider range of emotion in these
musicals--pensive, melancholy, vulnerable, disconsolate--but with the period's
emphasis on wit and sophistication, emotion was usually framed by urbane
understatement. Also, since songwriters were still aiming for Tin Pan Alley's
popular market, they constructed such "character" lyrics so that they could be
popularized, beyond the show or movie, by either male or female vocalists.
Frequently, only the verse of a song, often omitted in performances outside the
show, might identify the singer as female, while the all-important chorus would be
androgynous. Thus in the verse to "My Funny Valentine," from the 1937 musical,
Babes In Arms, Larry Hart would portray a woman in love with what she calls a
"slightly dopey gent." But in the chorus, the lyrics are only implicitly "feminine,"
as she admits his "looks are laughable--unphotographable" and his "figure less
than Greek." Such sentiments, sung by a male singer, might sound slightly odd-but also refreshingly different from the stereotypical male fascination with his
beloved's face and physical features.
Eliminating the "female" verse enabled Sinatra to record many Broadway
songs of the 1920s and '30s. "April in Paris," written by Yip Harburg and Vernon
Duke for Evelyn Hooey in the 1932 musical, Walk a Little Faster, had a verse
where the singer describes herself waltzing down the streets of Paris and getting
drunk on a mere tang of wine in the air. Sinatra, as he did with several songs,
simply used the release, "I never knew the charm of spring . . .," as a verse
introduction. Still, the wit of the lyric lies in its spinsterish sentiment. Harburg,
schooled in light-verse wit, took the hackneyed formula of a woman sitting at a
Parisian cafÈ in the spring and thinking of an old flame and gave it a clever twist.
The woman in "April in Paris" has never had a lover before--"never missed a
warm embrace"--but such is the power of Paris in the spring that now she wishes
she had--just so she would have a warm memory to recall over her wine.
Other songs required more lyrical revision. For "It Never Entered My
Mind," Sinatra not only had to eliminate the verse, with its talk of a "mud-pack on
my face" and "my hairdo in place," but change lines in the chorus, such as "I'll
sing the maiden's prayer again" to "lonely prayer again." At times, a simple switch
of pronoun would suffice: from "I get too hungry for dinner at eight" to "She gets
too hungry," making him the observer rather than protagonist of "The Lady Is
aTramp." With a song like "Little Girl Blue," written for a woman who ruefully
addresses herself in the third person, Sinatra sounds like a commiserating friend
when he sings, "It's time you knew--old girl, you're through."
When a lyric required more extensive overhauling, Sinatra's revision could
improve on the original. Cole Porter wrote "Anything Goes" for the brassy Ethel
Merman, with lines like "If Mae West you like or me undressed you like, then
nobody will oppose." But somebody--Sammy Cahn?--revised it for Sinatra to
"When most guys today that women prize today are just silly gigolos." At other
times, Sinatra's changes could mar a well-crafted lyric. Another song Porter wrote
for Merman, "I Get a Kick Out of You," has an intricate string of internal rhymes-"Flying too high with some guy in the sky is my i-dea of nothing to do"--which
Sinatra muffs when he sings "gal" instead of "guy."
In his most complex appropriation of songs written for women, Sinatra
expanded the witty "cross-dressing" twists lyricists used to refresh the stale clichÈs
of romance. When Ira Gershwin, for example, wrote "Someone To Watch Over
Me" for Gertrude Lawrence in the 1926 musical, Oh, Kay!, he started with
stereotypically feminine sentiments such as "I'm a little lamb whose lost in the
wood," but with Lawrence's feisty stage persona in mind, he concluded by giving
her a more pugnacious and assertive, "Won't you tell him, please, to put on some
speed--follow my lead," before flip-flopping again to "Oh, how I need someone to
watch over me." Sinatra, recording this song thirty-something years later, gives the
gender ball another spin, recasting lines like "Although he may not be the man
some girls think of as handsome" to "Although I may not be" so that he can keep
the clever man some/ handsome rhyme.
However purists might resent such changes, they enabled Sinatra to sing
these feminine show tunes and turn them into familiar standards. At a time when
he was trying to redefine his singing persona from the bobby-soxer idol, the lyrics
of Porter, Hart, and the other great Broadway lyricists of their era gave Sinatra an
urbane sophistication that his straight pop songs didn't possess. By appropriating
these "feminine" lyrics, moreover, Sinatra infused his singing persona with wry
tenderness, wistful longing, and wrenching--but always elegant--sadness. He, in
turn, gave them a gritty, vernacular bite that they lacked when they were first
heard on the Broadway stage. To paraphrase Katherine Hepburn's famous
explanation of the magic of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, "If these songs gave
Sinatra class, he gave them balls."
University of North Carolina at Wilmington · Department of Creative Writing
601 S. College Rd.
Wilmington NC 28403
www.uncw.edu/writers