Writing songs with Johnny Mercer: Collaborating with a masterful ghost

Johnny Mercer, perhaps the best lyricist Georgia ever produced, never stopped scribbling ideas, and he wrote on whatever surface he could find — hotel stationery, the backs of envelopes, even coffee-stained napkins.

His combination of restless energy and boundless creativity led him to create more than 1,400 songs, many of them at the heart of the Great American Songbook.

In one 10-year period, from 1936 to 1946, he wrote or co-wrote “I’m An Old Cowhand From The Rio Grande,” “Too Marvelous For Words,” “Hooray for Hollywood,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” “Jeepers, Creepers,” “Day In-Day Out,” “Blues In The Night,” “Skylark,” “That Old Black Magic,” “Tangerine,” “Accentuate The Positive,” “Dream” (words and music), “On the Atchison, Topeka And The Santa Fe,” “Laura,” and “Come Rain Or Come Shine,” collaborating with the greatest composers of the day, including Richard Whiting, Harry Warren and Hoagy Carmichael.

Georgia State University has a deep archive of Mercer’s life and work, including manuscripts of his published and unpublished songs, demo recordings, an unpublished autobiography and 1,300 images.

To celebrate that rich legacy the school’s jazz band, under the direction of Gordon Vernick, coordinator of jazz studies, stages a concert every few years featuring Mercer’s songs.

Recently GSU has taken these concerts a step further, by assigning graduate students in its music program the task of collaborating with the Bard of Savannah, putting some of Mercer’s unpublished lyrics to music.

Credit: Miguel Martinez

Louis Heriveaux, a jazz pianist for 30 years who, in 2021, decided to go back to school for his masters, knew that his Mercer scholarship entailed resurrecting a handful of Mercer songs.

He expected to find these Mercer lyrics neatly typed, with verses and choruses laid out in rows. “And I would put melodies to those songs,” said Heriveaux, 48, a touring musician who has worked with Russell Gunn, Russell Malone and Jason Marsalis among many others.

What he didn’t know was that many of those songs were really a few lines, scattered across multiple scraps of paper. Assembling these bits of ideas was like putting together a broken Tiffany window from shards.

“I found pieces of songs written over here, written over there, scratched out ideas,” he said. “I had to first piece together some ideas to make a song, then try to put a melody and chords to that, in the style of the day.”

Heriveaux assembled three songs, “So Full of Love,” “Forward March,” “Have a Little Sip of Vin Rose,” with titles derived from the lyrics within, and arranged them for a full 18-piece big band.

He wouldn’t reveal the name of a fourth song, arranged for small combo, saying that one will be a surprise.

Credit: Miguel Martinez

The Georgia State University Jazz Band will perform the new songs Saturday, March 4, in an evening devoted to Johnny Mercer compositions. The band will be joined by jazz trumpeter and vocalist Joe Gransden and vocalist Robin Latimore.

Vernick said Heriveaux has risen to the occasion, commenting on the challenges of the task: “It’s got to be difficult,” he said, “because you’re dancing with ghosts.”

Heriveaux said “So Full of Love,” “dripping with romantic love,” reminds him of “those really romantic musicals where they would burst into song.”

So Full of Love

So full of love only for you, only your kiss makes me do what I do/

So full of love, and sweet desire, sometimes my heart wants to burst into fire/

You are the one that makes me feel, I’m walking on rainbows it’s so surreal/

If you feel like I, don’t let it die, so full of love am I

Born in Savannah in 1909, Mercer wanted to become an actor, and left Savannah for New York City after graduating high school. He tried out for the Garrick Gaieties with an original song he wrote for the occasion, “Out of Breath and Scared to Death of You.” The producers used the song but not the songwriter.

He finally made his mark, not as an actor, but as a vocalist, with the Paul Whiteman orchestra, and began writing songs for this popular band. He would eventually collaborate with upwards of 230 composers. (Some accounts place the total number of songs he wrote at 1,900.)

Though he lived most of his adult life in New York and California, Mercer retained a casual, ironic Southern humor in his style and the images of rural life in his subject matter. The watery landscape conjured up by “Moon River” helped Mercer win an Oscar in 1961. (He won again in 1962 for “The Days of Wine and Roses,” both tunes written with Henry Mancini.)

Credit: Miguel Martinez

“His cadence is Savannah,” said Vernick; “it’s different” from the tone of his fellow Tin Pan Alley scribes.

Heriveaux, 48, said it’s a bit intimidating following in the footsteps of Hoagy Carmichael and Henry Mancini, two of Mercer’s notable collaborators, but enormously rewarding.

“To be forever tied to him in the archive: It feels great.”