Senior Happening: Fred Miller Presents "Lecture-in-Song: Johnny Mercer"

The Livingston Public Library invites the public to our Senior Happening event on Friday, November 21st at 1pm featuring “Lecture-in-Song: Johnny Mercer”  performed by Fred Miller. 

Johnny Mercer´s much-deserved place in the songwriting pantheon of great creative artists is based on his superlative achievements as a major lyricist, a composer, a distinctive pop singer, and a recording executive.

Born in Savannah, Georgia in 1909, young John H. Mercer set off to New York during the Depression to become an actor on Broadway. At his first audition, he was told that what they needed was “girls and songs.” He obliged by writing his first song, “Out of Breath and Scared to Death of You” that found its way into the Garrick Gaieties of 1930. He also met and married a chorus girl from that show, launching both a successful songwriting career and a 40+ year marriage. In time, he was also singing on radio with Benny Goodman and Paul Whiteman and collaborating with some of the major composers of Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood.

Among his hits beginning in the thirties: “Lazy Bones” and “Skylark”(with Hoagy Carmichael); “I'm an Old Cowhand” (words & music by Mercer); “Too Marvelous for Words” and “Hooray for Hollywood” (with Richard Whiting); “Jeepers Creepers” and “You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby” (with Harry Warren); “Blues in the Night,” “That Old Black Magic,” “My Shining Hour,” “One For My Baby,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive” (with Harold Arlen); “Dearly Beloved,” “I´m Old Fashioned” (with Jerome Kern); a string of Hollywood hits such as “On The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” “Laura,” “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” (1951 Academy Award winner), “Something's Gotta Give,” and as late as the sixties with Henry Mancini, Academy Award winners “Days of Wine and Roses,” and “Moon River.”

Other Mercer standards: “Day In-Day Out,” “And The Angels Sing,” “Fools Rush In.” “I Remember You,” “Dream,” and dozens of others are forever linked to the forties and fifties. 

Always a recognizable, jovial personality as a singer and songwriter, Mercer also co-founded Capitol Records and became a major commercial power in the music industry. Above all else, Mercer´s lyrics are his calling card: the trains, the rivers, the birds, the sights and sounds of the American landscape all repeatedly show up in a way that have made him America's greatest songwriting folk poet.

Fred Miller is the founder of the Copper Penny Players, a singing class for amateurs that has been operating for the past quarter century. He has experience in many different musical fields, including opera, comedy and piano music. There are now more than seventy Lecture-in-Song programs that he performs around New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The Senior Happening is a monthly series that allows attendees (“Seniors” or otherwise) to socialize during the first part of the program (12 until 12:45 pm) by bringing a bag lunch, while enjoying desserts and coffee served by the Friends of the Library volunteers. The program and entertainment then begins at 1 pm.

Registration is required and may be done in person at the library; by telephone at (973) 992-4600; or online at www.livingstonlibrary.org. Registration begins on November 3rd  for Livingston residents and other Essex County residents. 

Unable to make the show? A pre-recorded video of the performance will be available on the library website, www.livingstonlibrary.org, for you to enjoy at your leisure. 

Senior Happening is made possible in part by funds from the Essex County Division of Cultural Affairs, a partner of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and through the support from the Friends of the Livingston Library.