Johnny Mercer Quotes

When the sweet talkin's done, a man is a two face, a worrisome thing who'll leave you to sing the blues in the night.

I'm gonna love you like nobody's loved you come rain or come shine.

So I've made up with Mar. I've made up with Señor Shitslacks. I'd even forged a shaky truce with Amanda. The only person I still needed to deal with was Johnny Mercer. Oh yeah, I had to kill Gabe Walker, too, but there was plenty of time for that.

That old black magic has me in its spell.

It’s something Johnny Mercer told me. He said, ‘When you play songs, you can bring back people’s memories of when they fell in love. That’s where the power lies.

... could tell you a lot, but you've gotta be true to the code. Make it one for my baby and one more for the road.

HIT SONG written by Johnny Mercer during the Second World War contained the words “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative….

Moon river, wider than a mile I'm crossing you in style some day Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way Two drifters, off to see the world There's such a lot of world to see We're after the same rainbow's end, waitin' 'round the bend My huckleberry friend, moon river, and me

It wasn't that I was lazy- I was a bloody hard worker- I just found concentrating on one thing particularly difficult when I had such mammoth internal battles going on. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. Only when I was physically exhausted did I seem to manage a modicum of internal peace, when my mind would stop ticking over. I needed to try and get to grips with it all. There was a very little awareness about 'mental health' in those days. I just felt like I was mad,

It wasn't that I was lazy- I was a bloody hard worker- I just found concentrating on one thing particularly difficult when I had such mammoth internal battles going on. Only when I was physically exhausted did I seem to manage a modicum of internal peace, when my mind would stop ticking over. I needed to try and get to grips with it all. There was a very little awareness about 'mental health' in those days. I just felt like I was mad

Hear that lonesome whistle blowing/'cross the trestle' John Mercer would write to Arlen's music, and suddenly Tin Pan Alley seemed to contain railway yards and bus depots that hadn't been there before. 'It's a quarter to three/there's no one in the place except you and me,' writes Mercer also, and Arlen's music conveys all the solitude of a roadhouse in the outback, as far from Johnny's Savannah' social register as it is from the Arluck parlor. Both Mercer and Arlen saw this other America as clearly as the half-British Raymond Chandler saw Los Angeles, with the freshness and sharpness of outsiders, and their songs constitute priceless social documents.

At some unknown early date, he [Mercer] took to crossing over regularly to the black side of town, where he immersed himself so deeply in jazz and blues that he would one day receive a citation from a black social group calling him 'our favorite colored singer.' As Hoagy Carmichael, his partner in jazz, would say, 'Johnny knew.' For all his adaptability, there was a black-jazz base in everything Mercer wrote.