Word: mercerize
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...When romance was called for, Mercer was there too. "How Little We Know," for which Hoagy Carmichael provided the plangent melody, boasts a lovely sense of ignorance toward a potential affair: "Who knows why an April breeze never remains? / Why the stars in the trees hide when it rains? / Love comes along casting a spell, / Will it sing you a song, / Will it say a farewell? / Who can tell?" And at times, Mercer could twist a song's kicker. "Tangerine," written with Victor Schertzinger for The Fleet's In, sounds for most of its length like a standard number about...
...Street to the invaluable City Centers Encores! series, which last night premiered its concert version of the Gershwins' 1931 hit Of Thee I Sing. Or go further northeast to one of the city's magnificent cultural resources, the 92nd Street Y, which last weekend presented "Hooray for Hollywood: Johnny Mercer at the Movies." Those are the places I was this week, in heaven. Read on, and sing along...
...Johnny Mercer, Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories 1890-1954 informs us, was "the lyricist for more popular songs than any other songwriter in history." In the mid-'40s, Mercer, a founder of Capitol Records, also had three No. 1 hits as a vocalist: "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive," "Candy" and "On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe" - a record, I believe, for a classic pop songwriter. The Savannah native with the gap-toothed smile was the author or co-author of more than 1,000 songs, which scaled the charts for 30 years, in the prime of the Great...
...genesis of another late Mercer hit shows the songwriter's generosity. In 1958 he received, on two pages torn from a desk calendar, a scrawled suggestion from a Youngstown, Ohio, housewife, Sadie Vimmerstedt. "I want you to write a song for me," she wrote. "Based on ?I want to to be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart.' I know you could add a little story to the title and please me." Not only did Mercer add a little - no, a lot ("And that's when I'll discover that revenge is sweet, / When...
...Mercer's gift was for insinuating slang and Southern patois into his songs; his writing voice, like his vocal style, was that of a hip yokel. The songs performed at the Y by a quartet of soloists (Christine Ebersole, Jason Graae, Lewis Cleale and Amber Edwards) and, at the end, host Charles Osgood, displayed Mercer's ability to be sho'-nuff without showing off. "Have You Got Any Castles, Baby?" gets rhymes out of "mountains I clum ? oceans I swum." Another Oscar winner, "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening," swings easy with "In the shank of the night...