Winter 2000
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Mabel Mercer: Merely Marvelous
Collectables Jazz
Classics (COL-CD-6249), US, 1999
Reviewed by Earl Dachslager;
The Woodlands, Texas
Will all luck, next year will be as good or even better for musical centenary
celebrations as was 1998 (George Gershwin) and 1999 (Duke Ellington).
Y2K will mark the centennial birthdays of Aaron Copland, Kurt Weill, and
Mabel Mercer. All three richly deserve a rush of reissues, recollections,
and reevaluations. But for songbird fans, the most needed and most welcome
acclamations (and, hopefully, reissues) will be for the relatively neglected,
if not wholly forgotten, Mabel Mercer.
To some extent, signs of a Mercer rejuvenation are already in progress
half-a-year before her 100th birthdate (she was born February 3, 1900).
Late last year Andrea Marcovicci's tribute album, Some Other Time:
Marcovicci Sings Mercer, was released, and now we have the CD debut
of Mercer’s 1960 Atlantic album, Merely Marvelous, in tandem with
Jimmy Giuffre's 1958 Atlantic recording, Trav'lin' Light, packaged
as a twofer on the Collectables Jazz Classics label.
Certainly any reissue of Mercer is to be welcome with open arms and open
ears, and this is no exception. Up until now the only one of her albums
to be issued in its entirety on compact disc was Mabel Mercer Sings
Cole Porter (Rhino, 1994, with four bonus tracks also written by Porter).
Still, one has to wonder what this new release is doing on the same
CD with music arranged, played, and mostly written by the boppish composer
of Four Brothers. The two musicians have nothing, or certainly
very little, in common. Merely by putting Mercer on a disc labeled Jazz
Classics is certainly stretching the term to airy thinness. Classic, of
course, she is; jazz is another matter.
Why Collectables didn't combine Merely Marvelous with one of Mercer’s
other Atlantic recordings, for example Midnight at Mabel Mercer's
or Once in a Blue Moon, both from the late 1950s, is a good question
and may even have a good answer, although I have no idea what it might
be. But here again we probably shouldn't cavil too much and simply be
grateful for what we have rather than worry about what we have not, at
least in this case.
As noted, Merely Marvelous was recorded in Mercer’s 60th year.
It includes a dozen cuts which are fairly representative of her work at
this stage of her life and art. Accompanying her for this session were
Jimmy Lyon, piano; Jimmy Raney or Joe Puma, guitar; Beverly Peer, bass;
and Tim Kennedy, drums. Three of the cuts are from Jerome Kern – Let's
Begin, All in Fun, and Nobody Else But Me – and, as
usual with Mercer's choices, are among the less familiar examples of the
composer's work. All three are, well, merely marvelous and among the staples
of her repertoire.
Also included are a couple of tunes by her longtime friend and accompanist
(from 1946-50), Bart Howard (b. Howard Joseph Gustafson): Sell Me
and Don't Dream of Anybody But Me. Mercer recorded dozens of Howard's
tunes over her career, many of which were written for her or which she
made famous, indeed classic, including You Are Not My First Love,
My Love Is a Wanderer, Let Me Love You, It Was Worth
It, and Fly Me to the Moon. The latter is often said, falsely,
to have been written for her, when in fact it was first sung by Felicia
Sanders. But it was Mercer’s version that made it standard.
Besides the title track, Albert Hague and Dorothy Fields's Merely Marvelous,
the other cuts include a couple of Cy Coleman songs, I Walk a Little
Faster and You Fascinate Me So, plus the usual assortment of
rarely recorded or forgotten tunes; in this case, Willard Robison's Round
House Nellie, Marvin Fisher and Kenward Elmslie's Love Wise,
and William Roy's The Fifth of July. To my taste, Round House
Nellie, a comic ditty, is the only dud on the album. It may have been
effective when seen and heard live, but on the record it's pretty banal.
By the time she made this recording in 1960, Mercer had behind her nearly
fifty years of show business, as both a dancer and a singer. She was born
in Staffordshire, England to an English-Welsh mother, Mabel LaBlanche,
and a black American musician, about whom nothing is known, name included.
Mercer never spoke of her origins and saw her father, at most, once or
twice. According to her biographer, James Haskins, to whom I'm obliged
for most of my biographical information, it's unclear how she got the
name Mercer. Thus racially she was half-black and half-white, the black
half being most evident in her kinky hair, which earned her the childhood
sobriquet of "golliwog." She thought of herself as a "colored" person.
As English vaudeville performers, her mother and stepfather were usually
on the road. At around age seven she was sent to a Catholic convent school,
and remained a devout Catholic all of her life. She quit school at age
14 and joined her aunt Rhoda King's vaudeville act. She worked at a teenager
in several vaudeville/minstrel type shows, including a couple of all-black
shows, such as Spades and Diamonds, Colored Society, and
The Chocolate Kiddies. In order to get work, she also did a few
stints as a male impersonator, including one as an orchestra conductor.
After the Armistice she traveled throughout Europe, including Belgium,
where she saw her first black American band. This was in the early 1920s,
and Europe had just met and immediately fallen in love with what the French
called le jazz hot. Around the same time, realizing she was not
destined to be a great dancer, she started voice lessons (she was a mezzo-soprano)
with hopes of becoming a concert singer. While in London, in 1927, she
got a small part in Show Boat, which starred the thirty-year-old
Paul Robeson. Her hopes of becoming a concert singer never happened, or
not as she planned, but in an another, ironic, way it did. As a cabaret/saloon
singer, she didn't just sing for her audience, she gave concerts, cabaret
concerts as it were. A good sense of her concert style can be heard on
this CD on Willard Robison's The Fifth of July, and on Rodgers
and Hart's You're Nearer, two of the many highlights.
By the late 1920s Mercer had pretty much settled down in Paris. While
Paris was the place to be in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it was there
where she ran into her first experiences with racism, which were to plague
her for most of her life. In 1931, a turning point in her life, she went
to work for Bricktop (b. Ada Smith), helping to run her famous club at
66 Rue Pigalle. There she met everyone: Josephine Baker, the Windsors,
Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vincent Youmans,
and Duke Ellington, among many other notables of the day. Django Reinhardt
was fascinated by her and wrote a song, Mabel, in her honor.
It was in Paris where she started to develop and perfect the intimate
"cabaret" (from the French cambarette, a small room) style that
she practically invented. She figured out how to "tell" a song as much
as sing it, to make the audience understand and appreciate the story of
the lyrics as much as the music. She was an actress almost as much as
a singer. She once told Loonis McGlohon, "every song is a one-act play."
Dave Garroway said of her performances, "Mabel is the greatest storyteller
in the business today." Perhaps more than any other singer, Mercer had
to be seen to be appreciated. As Haskins wrote, "Without being able to
see Mabel – the wink of the eye, the slight raising of the eyebrow, the
expressiveness of the hands," the listener couldn't really "get" her.
The incredible rapport she developed with her audiences is remarked upon
by nearly everyone who saw her alive, either in person or, as I did, on
TV. There was something maternal and sustaining about her bond with the
audience. Perhaps because she herself was childless, she adopted her audiences
as her children. Julius Monk once told her, "My dear, you are the equivalent
of a breast feeding."
By 1938 she was forced to leave Paris because of the Nazi threat, and
came to America, where again she encountered racism. Even though she worked
downtown, she was forced to live uptown in Harlem. She got her first job
in the States at Le Ruban Bleu, on East 56th, owned by Herbert Jacoby,
another expatriate and escapee from the Nazis. The first real friend she
made in America was the young (23) Howard Bart, also newly arrived in
New York. Of her singing at that time, Bart said, "I had heard a record
of Mabel's… You Better Go Now / The Folks Who Live on the Hill.
She had a high soprano voice which most people now wouldn't believe."
A later tonsillectomy deepened her voice to more mezzo than soprano.
For the next forty-five years (she died in 1984) New York was her home
base, although she occasionally ventured outside of Manhattan for work
or awards, including The Medal of Freedom in 1983. In the 1940s she got
a job in the Bahamas, but when the war ended she found herself stuck there,
unable to return to America since she was legally an alien (she didn't
become a citizen until 1952). To get back to the States, she arranged
a marriage of convenience to an openly gay, black, American southerner,
Kelsey Pharr. Although they remained good friends, the two of them never
lived together and hardly saw each other. But as a devout Catholic Mabel
refused to divorce Pharr and so remained legally married to him until
he died.
In New York she sang at a succession of clubs – the Three Deuces, the
Onyx, Tony's, the St. Regis, the Bon Soir, Cleo's – for more or less extended
periods of time. Her first permanent gig was at Tony's, where she stayed
for five years and where the American phase of her career really took
off. Tony's also featured a pianist and composer named Cy Walter, with
whom for a time she kept company. It was during these years that she also
began making recordings, most of which remain unavailable beyond their
original formats.
Among her earliest, and rarest, recordings were a couple she made in 1946
with Bart Howard. Among the tunes they recorded were You Are Too Beautiful
/ Just One of Those Things and I Loves You Porgy / The
Twelve Days of Christmas. According to Howard's recollection, "That
was a 12-inch record that we did at Mary somebody's studio in 1946. They
weren't widely released."
In the early 1950s she went more mainstream, at least in terms of production
and promotion, when she recorded three ten-inch albums for Atlantic –
Songs by Mabel Mercer Vols. I, II, and III. In 1956 she
recorded, also for Atlantic, one of her most famous and enduring recordings,
Mabel Mercer Sings Cole Porter. In 1957 Atlantic released The
Art of Mabel Mercer, a two-record set of mostly songs she had recorded
previously. This set included 28 tunes, many of which she served as midwife
to or were a standard part of her repertoire: Alec Wilder's While We're
Young, Goodbye John, and Did You Ever Cross Over to Sneeden's?;
George Cory's and Douglass Cross's You Will Wear Velvet and Carry
Me Back to Old Manhattan; Bart Howard's The First Warm Day in May,
Let Me Love You and You Are Not My First Love; and Cy Walter's
The End of a Love Affair and Some Fine Day. (Several of
these songs appear on Marcovicci's tribute CD.)
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mercer cut three more albums for
Atlantic: Midnight at Mabel Mercer's, Once in a Blue Moon,
and Merely Marvelous. Her records never sold particularly well,
underscoring again the fact that she was a performer who needed as much
to be seen as heard. In 1960 she was booked for a month-long engagement
at the Chicago Playboy Club's Library, where she appeared on one of the
then-popular Playboy late-night TV jazz shows. It was there, quite by
accident (I just happened to tune in that night looking for jazz), that
I first saw and heard Mercer. I vividly recall seeing this "lady
of a certain age" sitting in a chair, Buddha-like, not so much singing
songs as "narrating" them. She was magnetic and completely engaging, and
I was completely hooked.
The 1960s were mostly lean times for Mercer, as they were for jazz and
cabaret generally, but by the summer of 1968 things picked up when she
and Bobby Short appeared in the now-legendary concerts at Town Hall in
New York. The concerts, a huge success for her considering her age (68),
earned her the admiration of not only her longtime fans but of a whole
new generation of devotees. The first concert, in May, was recorded in
its entirety by Atlantic and issued on vinyl and cassette; that it has
not been issued on CD is disgraceful. Two months later Short and Mercer
did a second concert at Town Hall, which was also recorded by Atlantic
under the title The Realm of Mercer and Short. In 1975, on the
occasion of her 75th birthday, Atlantic reissued four of her earlier albums,
including Merely Marvelous. On her eightieth birthday, at the urging
of Loonis McGlohon, she recorded a two-record set for Audiophile entitled
Echoes of My Life.
It also should be noted that there are two videos extant of Mercer performing,
both recorded in the early 1980s during her long stint at Cleo's. The
longer of the two, Mabel Mercer Forever and Always is the more
typical of her programs; the shorter is entitled Mabel Mercer: A Singer's
Singer. While it's clear that by the time these videos were made she
was hardly singing at all but almost entirely speaking ("parlando") her
songs, nevertheless much of the Mercer magic comes across – her enthusiasm,
her complete control of her material (she claimed to have known by heart
1000 songs), and her utter commitment to her art.
Whitney Balliett, in his 1972 profile of Mercer in The New Yorker (reprinted in Alec Wilder and His Friends, 1974), said that Mercer "remains the matchless but largely unknown doyenne of American popular singing." So it was in 1972 and so it is now, and so I suspect it will always be. Because of who and what she was, Mercer likely will never be truly well known. But for those who do know of her and her music, and for those fortunate ones who are just about to meet her, this reissue is most welcome. We fervently hope that it's only the first of many more to come.
Tracks
1. Merely Marvelous (Albert Hague, Dorothy Fields)
2. Let's Begin (Jerome Kern, -Otto Harbach)
3. All in Fun (Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein)
4. The Fifth of July (William Roy)
5. Don't Dream of Anybody but Me (Neal Hefti, Bart Howard)
5. Round House Nellie (Willard Robison)
6. Sell Me (Bart Howard)
7. Love Wise (Marvin Fisher, Kenward Elmslie)
8. Nobody Else but Me (Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein)
9. You're Nearer (Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart)
10. I Walk a Little Faster (Cy Coleman, Carolyn Leigh)
11. You Fascinate Me So (Cy Coleman, Carolyn Leigh)
