Johnny Mercer, songwriter: reference sources (web and print); selected songs; recordings, videos; miscellany

Miles Kreuger opens his essay "Johnny Mercer -- Too Marvelous for Words" with the following paragraph that captures the broad outlines as well as the essence of the songwriter's fabulous career:

He received an astonishing eighteen Academy Award nominations for best song and and won four times. He has one of the largest catalogs of hits in ASCAP, for which he served as a board member. Largely a man who wrote lyrics, he also penned the music for some of his best songs, although Margaret Whiting claims that he could barely play the piano with one finger. He appeared as an actor in two movies and had bit roles in several Broadway productions. He cofounded Capitol Records and transformed the neophyte label into a competitor to RCA Victor, Columbia, and Decca. But it was as a familiar radio singer and recording star that Johnny Mercer by far became the best-loved songwriter in history ( The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer , p. xv) .

• Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive
• And the Angels Sing
• Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home
• Autumn Leaves
• Blues in the Night
• Bob White
• Can't Teach My Old Heart New Tricks
• Come Rain or Come Shine
• Day In, Day Out
• Days Of Wine And Roses
• Dearly Beloved
• Dream*
• Drinking Again
• Early Autumn
• Emily
• Fools Rush In
• Goody Goody*
• Hit the Road to Dreamland
• Hooray for Hollywood
• How Little We Know
• I Had Myself a True Love
• I Remember You
• I Thought About You
• I Wanna Be Around (to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart)*
• I Wonder What Became of Me
• I'm An Old Cowhand (from the Rio Grande)*
• I'm Building up to an Awful Letdown
• I'm Old Fashioned
• In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening
• Jeepers Creepers
• Laura
• Lazybones
• Let's Take the Long Way Home
• Midnight Sun
• Moon River
• My Shining Hour
• On the Atchison, Topeka, & The Santa Fe
• One for My Baby
• Out of This World
• P.S. I Love You
• Satin Doll
• Skylark
• Something's Gotta Give*
• Summer Wind
• Tangerine
• That Old Black Magic
• This Time the Dream's on Me
• Too Marvelous for Words
• Trav'lin' Light
• When A Woman Loves A Man
• When the World Was Young (Ah, the Apple Trees)
• You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby
• You Were Never Lovelier

Research Resources: Johnny Mercer

• The Johnny Mercer Foundation website
• Amazon (publications by and about, recordings, videos, sheet music, etc.)
• DBOPM (Database Of Popular Music: song list; awards; hit songs; co-writers)
• Songwriters Hall of Fame (biography and song list);
• Wikipedia (article);
• Internet Broadway Database (Broadway productions and song credits)
• Internet Movie Database (brief biography, filmography, movie song credits);
• The New York Times (articles about the songwriter); including: Stephen Holden, Those Amorous Lyrics, Borrowed from the Birds." The New York Times, Nov. 23, 2009 (review of Mercer Centennial concert at Carnegie Hall). Jay Atkinson. "Gettin' a Glow on in Mercer's Savannah." The New York Times, Jan. 29, 2010 (a tour of Mercer's Savannah).
• New York Public Library (catalog entries for books, personal papers, recordings, scores, etc.);
• NPR Music (archive of relevant programs often including audio segments): "Celebrating the Johnny Mercer Centennial," NPR music, Nov. 18, 2009;

Jeff Lunden. " 100 Years of Johnny Mercer, Pop Poet Laureate ." NPR Music , Nov. 18, 2009;

• PBS: Jeffrey Brown. "Conversation: Robert Kimball, Author of The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer." PBS News Hour Art Beat, Nov. 19, 2009.
• Indiana University Sheet Music Collection: Johnny Mercer
• Bob Bach and Ginger Mercer. Johnny Mercer:: The Life, Times and Song Lyrics of Our Huckleberry Friend. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1982.
• David Ewen. American Songwriters, An H. W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary. New York: The H. W. Wilson Co., 1987 (includes 146 bios of composers and lyricists). -- a wide selection of used copies is available at abebooks.com (entry, pp. 279-282).
• Thomas S. Hischak. Word Crazy: Broadway Lyricists from Cohan to Sondheim. New York: Praeger, 1991 (pp. 145-147).
• Philip Furia. Skylark The Life and Times of Johnny Mercer, New York: St. Martins Press, 2003.
• Gene Lees. Portrait of Johnny: The Life of John Herndon Mercer. New York: Pantheon, 2004.
• Ken Bloom. The American Songbook, The Singers, The Songwriters and the Songs. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2005 (entry--pp. 268-271 and others).
• Thomas S. Hischak. The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and Television. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008 (entry--p. 488).
• Robert Kimball, Barry Day, Miles Kreuger, and Eric Davis, The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer, New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 2009.
• Stephen Sondheim, Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany, New York: Alfred A Knoph, 2011 (mini-essay on Mercer, p. 308).
• Mercer and Crosby on the radio: cohmercer
• "Comes The Revolution, Baby": cohmercer
• Barry Day and Robert Kimball on Theater Talk: cunytv75
• Mercer and Nat King Cole: cohmercer

• Mercer photo portrait: Wikipedia Commons

Notes

• Johnny Mercer Capitol Collectors Series (collected recordings of Mercer singing his own work)

Cite this page: Johnny Mercer, songwriter: reference sources (web and print); selected songs; recordings, videos; miscellany, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songwriters/m_sws/mercer_johnny.html