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Story and Photography
By James Byous
Do I know and remember who Johnny Mercer is and was? It’s been asked of me over the past few years. I had heard of Johnny Mercer before moving to Savannah, Georgia. But, I hadn’t thought about him much – no need to in the bean fields and almond orchards of Central California. I’d heard his songs, Moon River and P.S. I Love You and the slap-in-the-face ditty, Hooray For Hollywood. I had especially heard of Jeepers, Creepers!... Hated Jeepers, Creepers! My ancient, Russian born piano teacher, Frances Bush, made me pound it out by the hour. I played it so much that it left a brass-wound, metallic, copper taste in my mouth to this day. But more than that, Mercer… he was an LA guy. A Hollywood guy. They were down there - Southern California - a world and a culture away. We looked at LA, and Hollywood and that whole dry, water-sucking region the way Southerners look at Yankees…. Them! I had no idea that he was a Savannah Boy.
I knew that he was somehow associated with the composer Henry Mancini. But, then the only Mancini I had ever stumbled across was Frank Mancini, a former member of the John Phillip Sousa Band who moved to the nearby town of Modesto and started an orchestra. They named a concrete and plaster orchestra bowl after him. Henry Mancini…. Frank Mancini… must be brothers! At least that’s what I thought growing up. Nope. Not connected. Not at all, at least not through my latest Google search… except for a Henry and Frank Mancini who the Huffington Post says gave money to the George Bush campaign… I seriously doubt that it’s the same two guys.
Mercer, I found, was from a Southern family. There is something different about Southern families. To me Southern families are like brackish water flowing through the marsh grass, swirling, blending, churning around the stalks and blades like an endless field of cream whisks. Everything, every drop and every family eventually end up with elements from the same origin. That’s the South. That’s something good about the South. Family. I like it. But, I guess I’m old fashioned.
Emma Kelly knew Johnny’s music. It made her famous when author John Berendt noticed her and included her name in the book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Like the quarter-play juke box in Leopold’s Ice Cream Shop – tick, tick, tick, D1, Blues In The Night, tick, D2, Skylark, tick, D3, One More For My Baby. As she played she became a Mercer Wurlitzer - a Rock Ola of Mercer tunes, stuck on auto pilot… day in, day out.
Johnny wrote music or lyrics for over fifteen-hundred songs. They say Emma knew over a thousand. She was another blade in the Savannah marshland; a little taller than the other blades, a little more noticeable, but part of the marsh. Years and years before I ever saw and heard her play Mercer songs she had dated my wife, Becky’s Uncle Calvin. Long before the war, before Tybee Railroad shut down and before Rock and Roll, Hip Hop and Heavy Metal washed through the culture and forced Johnny’s music into the backwater creeks and sloughs of old record shops and attic collections. But, not in Savannah.
Here in Savannah, Johnny Mercer’s presence is like pine pollen in the spring. At first you don’t notice it and suddenly one day it’s all around. The grass is yellow; the road is yellow and the car… the car looks like a freekin’ New York taxi. Mercer’s like that. He lived over there by the Kroger store. He lived just down the road from Aunt Dot on Burnside Island. She knew him, saw him at community meetings. “No big deal, that’s just Johnny.” “Didn’t you know cousin Larry used to date his niece?” Southern families are like that. That’s why they call everyone, “Cuz”. Because they are!
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Ahh,
Johnny Mercer,
Yes,
I Remember You
Volume1 Number1
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The Pin Point Oyster and Crab Packing Factory where young Mercer would visit after a short boat ride, just around the bend, from his home.
David Oppenheim is the local expert on Mercer. Not a this-is-the-huckleberry-bush-where-Johnny-relieved-himself-in-ninteen-twenty kind of knowledge. But, just short of it. He can take you to the house Johnny grew up in, to the creek he fished in and to the country store where he stopped in to grab a Coke on the way to town. David’s historic knowledge of Mercer - it’s out of this world. With David you don’t get Mercer history that you saunter through; you get Mercer history that you have to slog through like the thick, bottomless, marsh mud around a Vernon-River hammock. But it’s good. Mercer and his family were everywhere. They still are – and nice folks too. Not too goodie, goodie the way some of the old Savannah families are accused of acting.
At Christ Church he sang in the choir. In the building next to the Customs House, now a chain restaurant, his father ran the family real estate and insurance business. That is until the depression sucked their livelihood down the sewer like everyone else’s fortunes. On Back River, now named Moon River in honor of Johnny, he would dream away the hours drifting in a bateau. Just around the bend he would offload at the oyster shed to run around the dirt streets of Pin Point, a rural, black neighborhood where young Clarence Thomas would eventually grow up in and do likewise.
Johnny is buried at Bonaventure Cemetery - the Good and Evil Cemetery – where he’s related to a large segment of the population. It’s like a necropoliptic family reunion. The entire east-central section has familial tentacles that run from plot to plot to plot. The Anderson’s are cousins, with mayors and Civil War notables and the city’s first police chief; they’re right down the lane. The Owens family, as in the Owens Thomas House Museum, are cousins. They too are a block or two… off yonder. So’s everyone else. And that’s just the Nineteenth-Century cousins.
Sounds were a passion of Johnny Mercer. Savannah native, Joe Ryan remembers Mercer when, as a young soda jerk, he served Johnny. Mercer would come into the ice cream shop, find a quiet booth, lick on a tutti-frutti and write down the dialectic sounds and tones of others diners as they talked. One of those dialects, the Geechee brogue has an intonation similar to a Cajun tongue. It’s only one of the many nuanced burrs that flow across the lanes and squares of Savannah. It’s like the Gullah brogue. Some folks say it’s the same - but it’s different.
Gullah is from the Gullah people, black folk, an accent and language that is very strong and distinct. Geechee is named after the Ogeechee River south of town and is Gullah that spilled over and amalgamated with the dialect of the black and the white, river people. People like Johnny Mercer and his mother. It’s a little softer, hard as hell to understand if you’re not used to it, and it hangs out in places south of Savannah proper like Montgomery and Beaulieu and Coffee Bluff. It will pop up in the middle of town when an islander or river-bred soul moves inward for a job or a historic home or because they married a city dweller. They say that when Johnny and his mom wanted to converse privately, even in front of some family members, they would slip off into hard Geechee, confident that their words wore masks.
That’s what I’ve learned about Johnny Mercer since I’ve been here. And, it wouldn’t fill a thimble. I should have learned more, I suppose…. Guess something’s gotta give if I intend to stay. So, Johnny – yes, I remember you.
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Mercer's home on Moon River is a short distance from his childhood "summer" home on Burnside Island.
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Mercer's childhood home on Lincoln and Gwinette Streets.
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Savannah's Christ Church where Mercer served as a choir boy.
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The Bay Street building where Mercer's father ran a real estate and insurance business.
For more information on Johnny Mercer's 100th birthday celebration visit http://www.johnnymercercentennial.com
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Mercer's grave lies next to the cross topped marker of his father's first wife, Mary Walter Mercer.
