Download or read book Popular Performer Mercer written by Johnny Mercer and published by Alfred Music. This book was released on 2007-10-29 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johnny Mercer is one of the most prolific lyricists in history, having written the words for more than 1,000 songs. He collaborated with many composers, including Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael and Henry Mancini, to name a few. These beautiful arrangements by Melody Bober are perfect piano solos for lessons, recitals, or social gatherings. To show the clever brilliance of Mercer’s craft, the lyrics have been included. Titles: * Blues in the Night * Come Rain or Come Shine * Days of Wine and Roses * The Glow Worm * Hooray for Hollywood * Jeepers Creepers * On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe * Skylark * Summer Wind * You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.
Download or read book Johnny Mercer written by Glenn T. Eskew and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Herndon “Johnny” Mercer (1909–76) remained in the forefront of American popular music from the 1930s through the 1960s, writing over a thousand songs, collaborating with all the great popular composers and jazz musicians of his day, working in Hollywood and on Broadway, and as cofounder of Capitol Records, helping to promote the careers of Nat “King” Cole, Margaret Whiting, Peggy Lee, and many other singers. Mercer’s songs—sung by Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Lena Horne, and scores of other performers—are canonical parts of the great American songbook. Four of his songs received Academy Awards: “Moon River,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe,” and “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening.” Mercer standards such as “Hooray for Hollywood” and “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” remain in the popular imagination. Exhaustively researched, Glenn T. Eskew’s biography improves upon earlier popular treatments of the Savannah, Georgia–born songwriter to produce a sophisticated, insightful, evenhanded examination of one of America’s most popular and successful chart-toppers. Johnny Mercer: Southern Songwriter for the World provides a compelling chronological narrative that places Mercer within a larger framework of diaspora entertainers who spread a southern multiracial culture across the nation and around the world. Eskew contends that Mercer and much of his music remained rooted in his native South, being deeply influenced by the folk music of coastal Georgia and the blues and jazz recordings made by black and white musicians. At Capitol Records, Mercer helped redirect American popular music by commodifying these formerly distinctive regional sounds into popular music. When rock ’n’ roll diminished opportunities at home, Mercer looked abroad, collaborating with international composers to create transnational songs. At heart, Eskew says, Mercer was a jazz musician rather than a Tin Pan Alley lyricist, and the interpenetration of jazz and popular song that he created expressed elements of his southern heritage that made his work distinctive and consistently kept his music before an approving audience.
Download or read book Porter written by Cole Porter and published by Alfred Music Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rich textures, sophisticated harmonies and inventive rhythms make these arrangements ideal for hobbyists, advancing students, professional musicians or any Popular Performer. Titles: Another Op'nin', Another Show * Anything Goes * I Get a Kick Out of You * In the Still of the Night * I've Got You Under My Skin * My Heart Belongs to Daddy * Night and Day * So In Love * You're the Top.
Download or read book Skylark written by Philip Furia and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2004-12-09 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Skylark is the story of the tormented but glorious life and career of Johnny Mercer, and the first biography of this enormously popular and influential lyricist. Raised in Savannah, Mercer brought a quintessentially southern style to both his life in New York and to his lyrics, which often evoked the landscapes and mood of his youth ("Moon River", "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening"). Mercer also absorbed the music of southern blacks--the lullabies his nurse sang to him as a baby and the spirituals that poured out of Savannah's churches-and that cool smooth lyrical style informed some of his greatest songs, such as "That Old Black Magic". Part of a golden guild whose members included Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, Mercer took Hollywood by storm in the midst of the Great Depression. Putting words to some of the most famous tunes of the time, he wrote one hit after another, from "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" to "Jeepers Creepers" and "Hooray for Hollywood." But it was also in Hollywood that Mercer's dark underside emerged. Sober, he was a kind, generous and at times even noble southern gentleman; when he drank, Mercer tore into friends and strangers alike with vicious abuse. Mercer's wife Ginger, whom he'd bested Bing Crosby to win, suffered the cruelest attacks; Mercer would even improvise cutting lyrics about her at parties. During World War II, Mercer served as Americas's troubadour, turning out such uplifting songs as "My Shining Hour" and "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive." He also helped create Capitol Records, the first major West Coast recording company, where he discovered many talented singers, including Peggy Lee and Nat King Cole. During this period, he also began an intense affair with Judy Garland, which rekindled time and again for the rest of their lives. Although they never found happiness together, Garland became Mercer's muse and inspired some of his most sensuous and heartbreaking lyrics: "Blues in the Night," "One for My Baby," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Mercer amassed a catalog of over a thousand songs and during some years had a song in the Top Ten every week of the year--the songwriting equivalent of Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak--but was plagued by a sense of failure and bitterness over the big Broadway hit that seemed forever out of reach. Based on scores of interviews with friends, family and colleagues, and drawing extensively on Johnny Mercer's letters, papers and his unpublished autobiography, Skylark is an important book about one of the great and dramatic characters in 20th century popular music.
Download or read book Will You Take Me As I Am written by Michelle Mercer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-04-07 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joni Mitchell is one of the most celebrated artists of the last half century, and her landmark 1971 album, Blue, is one of her most beloved and revered works. Generations of people have come of age listening to the album, inspired by the way it clarified their own difficult emotions. Critics and musicians admire the idiosyncratic virtuosity of its compositions. Will You Take Me As I Am -- the first book about Joni Mitchell to include original interviews with her -- looks at Blue to explore the development of an extraordinary artist, the history of songwriting, and much more. In extensive conversations with Mitchell, Michelle Mercer heard firsthand about Joni's internal and external journeys as she composed the largely autobiographical albums of what Mercer calls her Blue Period, which lasted through the mid-1970s. Incorporating biography, memoir, reportage, criticism, and interviews into an illuminating narrative, Mercer moves beyond the "making of an album" genre to arrive at a new form of music writing. In 1970, Mitchell was living with Graham Nash in Laurel Canyon and had made a name for herself as a so-called folk singer notable for her soaring voice and skillful compositions. Soon, though, feeling hemmed in, she fled to the hippie cave community of Matala, Greece. Here and on further travels, her compositions were freshly inspired by the lands and people she encountered as well as by her own radically changing interior landscape. After returning home to record Blue, Mitchell retreated to British Columbia, eventually reemerging as the leader of a successful jazz-rock group and turning outward in her songwriting toward social commentary. Finally, a stint with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue and a pivotal meeting with the Tibetan lama ChÖgyam Trungpa prompted Mitchell's return to personal songwriting, which resulted in her 1976 masterpiece album, Hejira. Mercer interlaces this fascinating account of Mitchell's Blue Period with meditations on topics related to her work, including the impact of landscape on music, the value of autobiographical songwriting for artist and listener, and the literary history of confessionalism. Mercer also provides rich analyses of Mitchell's creative achievements: her innovative manner of marrying lyrics to melody; her inventive, highly expressive chords that achieve her signature blend of wonder and melancholy; how she pioneered personal songwriting and, along with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, brought a new literacy to the popular song. Fans will appreciate the previously unpublished photos and a coda of Mitchell's unedited commentary on the places, books, music, pastimes, and philosophies she holds dear. This utterly original book offers a unique portrait of a great musician and her remarkable work, as well as new perspectives on the art of songwriting itself.
Download or read book Focus On 100 Most Popular Vaudeville Performers written by Wikipedia contributors and published by e-artnow sro. This book was released on with total page 1438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil written by John Berendt and published by Random House. This book was released on 1994-01-13 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic of true crime, set in a most beguiling Southern city—now in a 30th anniversary edition with a new afterword by the author “Elegant and wicked . . . might be the first true-crime book that makes the reader want to book a bed and breakfast for an extended weekend at the scene of the crime.”—The New York Times Book Review Shots rang out in Savannah’s grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. In this sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative, John Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case. It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman’s Card Club; the turbulent young gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the “soul of pampered self-absorption”; the uproariously funny drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young people dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight. These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a sublime and seductive reading experience.
Download or read book Popular Performer Great American Songbook Complete written by Dan Coates and published by Alfred Music. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the most famous selections from the Great American Songbook are included in this collection. These classic favorites, masterfully arranged by Dan Coates for advanced piano, sound rich and full and will delight audiences as well as provide hours of enjoyment for hobbyists, advancing students, professional musicians, or any "popular performer." Titles: *Anything Goes *Cry Me a River *The Days of Wine and Roses *Dream a Little Dream of Me *Embraceable You *Falling In Love with Love *Fly Me to the Moon *Fools Rush In *I Get a Kick Out of You *I Got Rhythm *I Only Have Eyes for You *I'm in the Mood for Love *In the Still of the Night *It Had to Be You *I've Got You Under My Skin *The Lady Is a Tramp *Long Ago (And Far Away) *Love Is Here to Stay *Make Someone Happy *My Funny Valentine *On the Street Where You Live *The Shadow of Your Smile *Singin' in the Rain *Skylark *So In Love *Someone to Watch Over Me *Stardust *Summertime *They Can't Take That Away from Me *When I Fall In Love *Where or When *With a Song in My Heart *You'll Never Know
Download or read book A Haven For Songs written by Martin Wimmer and published by epubli. This book was released on 2021-08-27 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With A Haven For Songs: Connecting The Dots About Americana Music, selected works of novelist, lyricist and music critic Martin Wimmer are available in the USA for the first time. Martin Wimmer explains his personal relationship with the art of magicians such as Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker, Blaze Foley, Woody Guthrie, John Prine, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Mercer. These artists, among many others mentioned in the book, are the glue that holds together time, love, history, space, and identity. Join Wimmer on a trip down musical-memory lane as he recounts his adventures at the 30A Songwriter Festival in Florida, the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, and New York City. Finally, experience Wimmer's perspective on the Cajun music of Louisiana, Hawaiian Slack Key, the Paisley Underground scene in California, Americana in Europe, and how each of these music scenes are tied to the "Country & Folk" music we know and love today.
Download or read book The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music Mercer Johnny to Tillman Floyd written by Colin Larkin and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings written by Steve Sullivan and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-10-04 with total page 1027 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From John Philip Sousa to Green Day, from Scott Joplin to Kanye West, from Stephen Foster to Coldplay, The Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, Volumes 1 and 2 covers the vast scope of its subject with virtually unprecedented breadth and depth. Approximately 1,000 key song recordings from 1889 to the present are explored in full, unveiling the stories behind the songs, the recordings, the performers, and the songwriters. Beginning the journey in the era of Victorian parlor balladry, brass bands, and ragtime with the advent of the record industry, readers witness the birth of the blues and the dawn of jazz in the 1910s and the emergence of country music on record and the shift from acoustic to electrical recording in the 1920s. The odyssey continues through the Swing Era of the 1930s; rhythm & blues, bluegrass, and bebop in the 1940s; the rock & roll revolution of the 1950s; modern soul, the British invasion, and the folk-rock movement of the 1960s; and finally into the modern era through the musical streams of disco, punk, grunge, hip-hop, and contemporary dance-pop. Sullivan, however, also takes critical detours by extending the coverage to genres neglected in pop music histories, from ethnic and world music, the gospel recording of both black and white artists, and lesser-known traditional folk tunes that reach back hundreds of years. This book is ideal for anyone who truly loves popular music in all of its glorious variety, and anyone wishing to learn more about the roots of virtually all the music we hear today. Popular music fans, as well as scholars of recording history and technology and students of the intersections between music and cultural history will all find this book to be informative and interesting.
Download or read book The Johnny Mercer Centennial Sheet Music Collection written by Johnny Mercer and published by Alfred Publishing Company. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Standards Piano/Vocal/Guitar
Download or read book A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers written by Will Friedwald and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2010 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extensive biographical and critical survey of more than 300 jazz and popular singers is comprised of provocative, opinionated essays that incorporate the views of peers, fans and critics while assessing key movements and genres.
Download or read book Performance and Popular Music written by Ian Inglis and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007-11 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the emergence of rockOCOnOCOroll in the early 1950s, there have been a number of live musical performances that became hugely influential in the way they shaped the subsequent trajectory and development of popular music. Each, in its own way, introduced new styles, confronted existing practices, shifted accepted definitions, and provided templates for others to follow. Performance And Popular Music explores these processes by focusing on some of the specific occasions when such transformations occurred. An international array of scholars reveal that it is through the dynamics of performance OCo and the interaction between performer and audience OCo that patterns of musical change and innovation can best be recognised."
Download or read book Grand Solos for Piano Book 5 written by Melody Bober and published by Alfred Music. This book was released on 2008-02-12 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grand Solos for Piano is Melody Boberäó»s first complete series of solo collections since she became an exclusive Alfred Music author. The music in this six-book series is written in a variety of keys, styles, meters and tempos to appeal to both children and adults. The pieces have the distinctive Bober sound and are fun to play, in addition to helping pianists progress technically and musically. Whether performed on a concert grand, a digital piano or the family upright, these solos will truly sound "grand." Book 5 contains 9 pieces for intermediate pianists. Titles: * CarefreeŒæ * Carnival RagŒæ * Lakeside MorningŒæ * Music Box MemoryŒæ * Night ShadowsŒæ * Rush Hour BoogieŒæ * Too CoolŒæ * A Visit to ViennaŒæ * Winter in Whitman County
Download or read book Blacktino Queer Performance written by E. Patrick Johnson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging an important new conversation between performers and critics, Blacktino Queer Performance approaches the interrelations of blackness and Latinidad through a stimulating mix of theory and art. The collection contains nine performance scripts by established and emerging black and Latina/o queer playwrights and performance artists, each accompanied by an interview and critical essay conducted or written by leading scholars of black, Latina/o, and queer expressive practices. As the volume's framing device, "blacktino" grounds the specificities of black and brown social and political relations while allowing the contributors to maintain the goals of queer-of-color critique. Whether interrogating constructions of Latino masculinity, theorizing the black queer male experience, or examining black lesbian relationships, the contributors present blacktino queer performance as an artistic, critical, political, and collaborative practice. These scripts, interviews, and essays not only accentuate the value of blacktino as a reading device; they radiate the possibilities for thinking through the concepts of blacktino, queer, and performance across several disciplines. Blacktino Queer Performance reveals the inevitable flirtations, frictions, and seductions that mark the contours of any ethnoracial love affair. Contributors. Jossiana Arroyo, Marlon M. Bailey, Pamela Booker, Sharon Bridgforth, Jennifer Devere Brody, Cedric Brown, Bernadette Marie Calafell, Javier Cardona, E. Patrick Johnson, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, John Keene, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, D. Soyini Madison, Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., Andreea Micu, Charles I. Nero, Tavia Nyong'o, Paul Outlaw, Coya Paz, Charles Rice-González, Sandra L. Richards, Matt Richardson, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Celiany Rivera-Velázquez, Tamara Roberts, Lisa B. Thompson, Beliza Torres Narváez, Patricia Ybarra, Vershawn Ashanti Young
Download or read book The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer written by Johnny Mercer and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2009-10-20 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seventh volume in Knopf’s critically acclaimed Complete Lyrics series, published in Johnny Mercer’s centennial year, contains the texts to more than 1,200 of his lyrics, several hundred of them published here for the first time. Johnny Mercer’s early songs became staples of the big band era and were regularly featured in the musicals of early Hollywood. With his collaborators, who included Richard A. Whiting, Harry Warren, Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, and Harold Arlen, he wrote the lyrics to some of the most famous standards, among them, “Too Marvelous for Words,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “Skylark,” “I’m Old-Fashioned,” and “That Old Black Magic.” During a career of more than four decades, Mercer was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song an astonishing eighteen times, and won four: for his lyrics to “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” (music by Warren), “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” (music by Carmichael), and “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses” (music for both by Henry Mancini). You’ve probably fallen in love with more than a few of Mercer’s songs–his words have never gone out of fashion–and with this superb collection, it’s easy to see that his lyrics elevated popular song into art.
