Portrait of Johnny
The Life of John Herndon Mercer
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
An intimate biography of the great songwriter, this is also a deeply affectionate memoir by one of Johnny Mercer’s best friends.
“Moon River,” “Laura,” “Skylark,” ”That Old Black Magic,” “One for My Baby,” “Accentuate the Positive,” “Satin Doll,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “Something’s Gotta Give”—the honor roll of Mercer’s songs is endless. Both Oscar Hammerstein II and Alan Jay Lerner called him the greatest lyricist in the English language, and he was perhaps the best-loved and certainly the best-known songwriter of his generation. But Mercer was also a complicated and private man.
A scion of an important Savannah family that had lost its fortune, he became a successful Hollywood songwriter (his primary partners included Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern), a hit recording artist, and, as co-founder of Capitol Records, a successful businessman, but he remained forever nostalgic for his idealized childhood (with his “huckleberry friend”). A gentleman, a nasty drunk, funny, tender, melancholic, tormented—Mercer was a man immensely talented yet plagued by
self-doubt, much admired and loved but never really understood.
In music historian and songwriter Gene Lees, Mercer has his perfect biographer, who deals tactfully but directly with Mercer’s complicated relationships with his domineering mother; his tormenting wife, Ginger; and Judy Garland, who was the great love of his life. Lees’s highly personal examination of Mercer’s life is sensitive as only the work of a friend of many years could be to the conflicts in Mercer’s nature. And it is filled with insights into Mercer’s work that could come only from a fellow lyricist (whose own lyrics were much admired by Mercer).
A poignant, candid, revelatory portrait of Johnny.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Johnny Mercer wrote some of the best-known lyrics in the American repertoire ("Moon River"; "Black Magic"; "Accentuate the Positive"; etc.); he won four Academy Awards for his songs and helped found Capitol Records. Lees, a biographer (Oscar Peterson: The Will to Swing, etc.) and publisher of the award-winning Jazzletter, met Mercer in the twilight of his career and maintained a friendship with him until Mercer's death in 1976. Lee's biography differs from Philip Furia's more scholarly and novelistic Skylark: The Life and Times of Johnny Mercer chiefly in its conversational tone and in Lees's confident, insightful analysis of the music, but it also must bear the weight of the author's feelings about Mercer's family and career. The decline of Mercer's fame roughly coincides with, as Lees puts it, the death of "the golden age of American songwriting" and the "rising tide of the meretricious" (read: rock and roll), and the book periodically gets bogged down in Lees's curmudgeonly grumblings about the superiority of the big band era. Lees also seems unnecessarily judgmental in his accounts of Mercer's marriage to Ginger Meehan, whom he blames in part for her husband's depression, angry tirades and alcoholism. Lees's personal accounts are more illustrative than informative, confirming an already well-documented picture of Mercer's generosity and intelligence as well as his alcoholic vitriol.
