Music Pick: Johnny Mercer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPGg4USB3Hs

Johnny Mercer (1909-1975) is revered as the premier lyricist of the Great American Song Book. He was also a terrific singer, especially when recording his own compositions such as the feature, "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe", an Oscar winner (first of 4 Mercer Oscars) for best song from the 1946 flick, "The Harvey Girls". Mercer's specialty were bluesy, southern inflected love songs such as "Blues in the Night", "Skylark", "One for my baby", "And the angels sing", "Too marvelous for words", "Day in, day out", "Fools rush in", "I remember you", "You were never lovelier", "Laura", "Satin Doll", "Come rain or come shine", "Days of wine and roses", "Summer wind", and the haunting "Moon river", among hundreds of others. "Santa Fe" recreates the era when passenger trains were king as the words and music conger up a virtual travelogue in your mind of the famed Santa Fe chugging across the countryside. Steve Goodman's 1971 "City of New Orleans" chronicled the death of the passenger train with the tagline, "This train's got the disappearing railroad blues", but "Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe" offers not a hint of the sad fate awaiting it.