John Herndon Mercer (November 18, 1909 – June 25, 1976) was an American lyricist, songwriter, and singer, as well as a record label executive who co-founded Capitol Records with music industry businessmen Buddy DeSylva and Glenn E. Wallichs.
He is best known as a Tin Pan Alley lyricist, but he sometimes composed music, despite not knowing piano or standard musical notation, and was a popular singer who recorded his own as well as others' songs from the mid-1930s through the mid-1970s. Mercer wrote the lyrics to more than 1,200 songs, including compositions for movies, Broadway shows, and well-known standards of the time, including "Autumn Leaves", "Days of Wine and Roses", "Hooray for Hollywood", "I'm an Old Cowhand" (music & lyrics), and "Moon River". He received eighteen Oscar nominations and won four Best Original Song Oscars.
Mercer was born in 1909, in Savannah, Georgia, where one of his first jobs, aged 10, was sweeping floors at the original 1919 location of Leopold's Ice Cream. Mercer lived on Lincoln Street, a block away from the store's East Gwinnett and Habersham location.
Mercer's father, George Anderson Mercer, was a prominent attorney and real-estate developer. Mercer's mother, Lillian Elizabeth (née Ciucevich), was the daughter of a Croatian immigrant father and a mother with Irish ancestry. Lillian was the senior Mercer's secretary and second wife. Lillian's father, born in Lastovo, in 1834 to Ivana Cucevic and Marijo Dundovic, was a merchant seaman who ran the Union blockade during the Civil War. Mercer was George's fourth son and Lillian’s first. His great-grandfather was Confederate General Hugh Weedon Mercer and he was a direct descendant of American Revolutionary War General Hugh Mercer, a Scottish soldier-physician who died at the Battle of Princeton. Mercer was also a fourth cousin of General George S. Patton.
Mercer liked music as a small child and attributed his musical talent to his mother, who would sing sentimental ballads. Mercer's father also sang, mostly old Scottish songs. His aunt told him he was humming music when he was six months old and later she took him to see minstrel and vaudeville shows where he heard "coon songs" and ragtime. The family's summer home, "Vernon View", was on the tidal waters and Mercer's long summers there among mossy trees, saltwater marshes, and soft, starry nights inspired him years later.
As a child, Mercer had African-American playmates and servants, and he listened to the fishermen and vendors about him, who spoke and sang in the Gullah language. He was also attracted to Black church services. Mercer later stated, "Songs always fascinated me more than anything." He had no formal musical training but was singing in a choir by six and at 11 or 12 he had memorized almost all of the songs he had heard and became curious about who wrote them. He once asked his brother who the best Tin Pan Alley songwriter was, and his brother said Irving Berlin.
Despite Mercer's early exposure to music, his talent was clearly in creating the words and singing, not in playing music, though early on he had hoped to become a composer. In addition to the lyrics that Mercer memorized, he was an avid reader and wrote adventure stories. His attempts to play the trumpet and piano were not successful, and he never could read musical scores with any facility, relying instead on his own notation system.
As a teenager in the Jazz Era, he searched for records by early blues/jazz figures including Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong. His father owned the first car in town, and Mercer's teenage social life was enhanced by his driving privilege, which sometimes verged on recklessness. The family would motor to the mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, to escape the Savannah heat and there Mercer learned to dance (from Arthur Murray himself) and to flirt with Southern belles, his natural sense of rhythm helping him on both accounts. (Later, Mercer wrote a humorous song called "Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry".)
Mercer attended the exclusive Woodberry Forest School in Virginia until 1927. Although not a top student, he was active in literary and poetry societies and as a humor writer for the school's publications. In addition, his exposure to classic literature augmented his already rich store of vocabulary and phraseology. He began to scribble ingenious, sometimes strained, rhymed phrases for later use. Mercer was also the class clown and a prankster, and member of the "hop" committee that booked musical entertainment on campus.
Mercer was already somewhat of an authority on jazz at an early age. His yearbook stated: "No orchestra or new production can be authoritatively termed 'good' until Johnny's stamp of approval has been placed upon it. His ability to 'get hot' under all conditions and at all times is uncanny." Mercer began to write songs, an early effort being "Sister Susie, Strut Your Stuff".
Given his family's long association with Princeton, New Jersey, and Princeton University, Mercer was groomed to go to school there, but those ambitions were dashed by his father's financial setbacks in the late 1920s. He went to work in his father's recovering business, collecting rent and running errands, but soon grew bored with the routine and with Savannah.
Mercer moved to New York in 1928, when he was 19. His first few jobs were as a bit actor (billed as John Mercer). Holed up in a Greenwich Village apartment with time on his hands and a beat-up piano to play, Mercer soon returned to music. He secured a day job at a brokerage house and sang at night. Pooling his meager income with that of his roommates, Mercer managed to keep going, sometimes on little more than oatmeal. One night he dropped in on Eddie Cantor backstage to offer a comic song, but although Cantor did not use the song, he began encouraging Mercer's career. Mercer's first lyric, for the song "Out of Breath (and Scared to Death of You)", composed by friend Everett Miller, appeared in a musical revue The Garrick Gaieties in 1930. (Mercer met his future wife at the show, chorus girl Ginger Meehan; she had earlier been one of the many chorus girls pursued by the young crooner Bing Crosby.) Through Miller's father, an executive at the prominent music publisher T. B. Harms, Mercer's first song was published. It was recorded by Joe Venuti and his New Yorkers.
The 20-year-old Mercer began to frequent the company of other songwriters and to learn the trade. He traveled to California to undertake a lyric writing assignment for the musical Paris in the Spring and met his idols Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong. Mercer found the experience sobering and realized that he much preferred free-standing lyric writing to writing on demand for musicals. Upon his return, he got a job as staff lyricist for Miller Music for a $25-a-week draw, which give him a base income and enough prospects to win over and marry Ginger in 1931. The new Mrs. Mercer quit the chorus line and became a seamstress, and to save money the newlyweds moved in with Ginger's mother in Brooklyn. Johnny did not inform his parents of his marriage until after the fact. In 1932, Mercer won a contest to sing with the Paul Whiteman orchestra, but singing with the band did not help his situation significantly. He made his recording debut, singing with Frank Trumbauer's Orchestra, on April 5 of that year. Mercer then apprenticed with Yip Harburg on the score for Americana, a Depression-flavored revue famous for "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" (not a Mercer composition), which gave Mercer invaluable training. While with Whiteman, he recorded two duets with fellow band member Jack Teagarden, "Fare Thee Well to Harlem" and "Christmas Night in Harlem". The latter was a best-selling record. After several songs which did not catch fire during his time with Whiteman, he wrote and sang "Pardon My Southern Accent" (1934). Mercer's fortunes improved dramatically with a chance pairing with Indiana-born Hoagy Carmichael, already famous for the standard "Stardust", who was intrigued by the "young, bouncy butterball of a man from Georgia." Mercer, later well known for rapidly writing lyrics, spent a year laboring over the ones for "Lazybones", which became a hit one week after its first radio broadcast, and each received a large royalty check of $1250. Mercer became a member of ASCAP and a recognized "brother" in the Tin Pan Alley fraternity, receiving congratulations from Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter among others. Whiteman lured Mercer back to his orchestra, temporarily breaking up the working team with Carmichael.