The New York Times: Music Review | Lyrics & Lyricists, by Stephen Holden, November 20, 2009
Because it described Army life during World War II in bebop slang, Johnny Mercer’s “G.I. Jive,” one of the few songs for which he wrote both words and music, usually isn’t regarded as one of his great perennials, although it was a No. 1 hit for Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five in 1944.
It remained for his fellow lyricist Sheldon Harnick to point out its brilliance and to make it the artistic flashpoint of the special centennial tribute to Mercer staged by the 92nd St. Y’s Lyrics & Lyricists series on Wednesday evening. Ever the pithy linguistic analyst, Mr. Harnick called attention to an amusing pun in which an exhausted soldier finds himself “countin’ Jeeps” instead of sheep.
Mr. Harnick, who described Mercer as a folk poet and ranked him alongside Ira Gershwin, Ogden Nash and E. Y. Harburg in his gift for wordplay, sang “G. I. Jive” with a rough swinging exuberance, articulating every zany syllable.
As the music historian Robert Kimball, one of the show’s artistic directors and an editor of “The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer” (Knopf), a beautifully produced new 462-page anthology, points out in his notes to the book, “Many people consider the song the World War II equivalent of Irving Berlin’s ‘Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.’ “
Mr. Harnick was the only performer among the cast of some two-dozen singers and musicians to capture intact the lighthearted glee of Mercer’s comic imagination. He was not helped by the evening’s host, Charles Osgood, whose perfunctory account of Mercer’s life was a lightly annotated list of accomplishments – more than 1,300 song lyrics, 230 collaborators, four Oscar-winning best songs – lacking in color and enthusiasm.
Leading the list of smaller pleasures was the singer and pianist Loston Harris’s sultry, inventively syncopated rendition of “This Time the Dream’s on Me,” accompanied by a jazz trio. Marilyn Maye’s robust, jazz-flavored “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home” filled up the room.
La Tanya Hall (“Skylark”) and Paula West (“I Remember You”) offered warm, vocally polished renditions of classic Mercer ballads and Barbara Carroll, a sly, elegant “Too Marvelous for Words.”
But even during the traditional Lyrics & Lyricists end-of-evening sing along (“Moon River”) in which the audience joins the performers, the goal of collective euphoria proved elusive.