The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer

The seventh volume in Knopf's critically acclaimed Complete Lyrics series, published in Johnny Mercer's centennial year, contains the texts to nearly 1,500 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 18 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 songshis words have never gone out of fashionand with this superb collection, it's easy to see that his lyrics elevated popular song into art.

Robert Kimball has edited the Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Frank Loesser, and Ira Gershwin. He lives in New York.

Barry Day has written books on Noël Coward, Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, and P. G. Wodehouse. He lives in New York, London, and Palm Beach.

Miles Kreuger, the president of the Institute of the American Musical, is the author of Show Boat: The Story of a Classic American Musical. He lives in Los Angeles.