Long Time Leaving (39 page)

Johnny Mercer, say people who knew him, was a lovely, lovely man but a mean, mean drunk. Hey, he hung with Billie Holiday, which is more than I can say, and I would love to have done the work he did (just to have written “Glowworm”!), but if there is anything a shade irritating about his melliflous-yet-friendly singing accent, it is that he seems to be rather too comfortably putting on a tinge of minstrelish blackness. His lesser contemporary Phil Harris could rip through a nominally embarrassing number like “Darktown Poker Club” with no condescension in his tone of voice, but a rude whimsicality discolors several otherwise enjoyable songs in which Mercer refers explicitly to the African American roots of swing. Check out “Mr. Meadowlark,” “The “Waiter and the Porter and the Upstairs Maid,” and “The Old Music Master.” That last number is a duet sung by Jack Teagarden, as a classical composer of the nineteenth century, and Mercer, as “a little colored boy” from the twentieth who startles the old composer by singing, “You got to jump it, Music Master, / You got to play that rhythm faster.”

And in “Mr. Crosby and Mr. Mercer,” Crosby sings:

Mercer:

Crosby:

It's meant to be duly integrative, but does it take sufficiently into account that Louis Armstrong (whom they both worked with) might be listening? And asking himself, “Can it be that these cats think
I'm
the novelty act?” Arthur Schwartz—the eminent composer of “Dancing in the Dark” and many another standard—is quoted in
Our Huckleberry Friend
as declaring that “Blues in the Night” is “the greatest blues song ever written, and that includes ‘St. Louis Blues.’ ” Hooey. He must have thought “Love in Vain” and “Trouble in Mind” were cave paintings. No wonder Elvis blew those old guys away. It's a miracle of American dissociation that Robert Johnson didn't, twenty years sooner.

Surely Mercer himself, being Southern, realized that “Blues in the Night” was a terrific popular song, but the greatest
blues
song? It took Yankees forever to realize that the blues were
more primary
than Tin Pan Alley. For years you could hear them calling Frank Sinatra the greatest living singer—with Ray Charles right there all along. Get it together, North.

But listen to me talk. I have assembled momma, the oral tradition, trains, lonesomeness, the blues, the Lost Cause, Natchez, Mobile (“from Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe…”), hogs and dogs. And what have I got? I haven't even addressed the issue of how the
Wh
in
Who-who-ey
was pronounced. As an
h,
as in the word
who?
Or as
hw,
as in the word
why?
The latter is the sound I was going for in attempting to phoneticize the old man's Gettysburg-reunion yell. But that can hardly have registered on those readers who pronounce the
wh
in
why
as a
w—
which I have always thought of as an odd (Northern?) form of
h-
dropping. It, whatever it is, is a far cry from all coming together.

I'm not saying it's not out there somewhere. On a CD entitled
An Evening with Johnny Mercer,
he has this to say about lyric writing:

Then he sings “Blues in the Night.”

I
guess I'd give just about anything to have written the Bellamy Brothers’ “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me?” Not the song, just the title. I have, in fact, come up with the following title, which may be deemed more appropriate in these times of political sensitivity: “If I Said ‘If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me?’ Would You Hold It Against Me?”

In my time, I have also written “I'm Just a Bug on the Windshield of Life,” “Oh, I've Broken a Whole Lot of Hearts (And Several of Them Were Mine),” “I'd Give My Right Arm to Hold You in My Arms Again,” “She Ain't No Bigger Than a Minute (But She Can Go Like an Hour and a Half),” “Things Had a Way of Evening Out (Till I Spent One out with You),” and many others. These were all strictly amateur titles, but I'll say this: I was up till four in the morning one night writing one with Jack Daniel's and Tom T Hall. If you can't write a country song title with those two, you can't write a country song title with anybody.

We were attending a conference on Southern autobiography at the University of Central Arkansas. I've been sitting here trying to come up with an autobiographical song title inspired by that song-title-writing experience—along the lines of “Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me” and “Hank Williams, You Wrote My Life.”

“Me and Tom T and Jack” comes to mind. Trouble is, it requires a song. The best country music titles are poems in themselves. Like “How Come My Dog Don't Bark When You Come Around?” or “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy,” or “It Was Always So Easy to Find an Unhappy Woman (Till I Started Looking for Mine).”

The title Tom T and I wrote required a song, too, and we wrote one. Trouble was, we couldn't read it the next morning. Our title, “Pockets of Poverty,” seemed to offer all kinds of possibilities, since the word
pockets
was so susceptible to being turned inside out. A poet, Judson Mitcham, helped us until 2 or 3 a.m., but then, after coming up with a line that seemed at the time to entail a great imaginative leap (“If I had some money, I would give it all away”), he gave out. Maybe Tom T. and I should have called it a night then, too (how about this one: “How Can We Call It a Night, This Close to Next Afternoon?”), because although Tom T.'s
guitar playing and bridgework (“But that don't mean that me and mine / Can't have three squares a day, / Hm-hmmm-hm-hmmm…”) held up fine, my handwriting got worse.
^*

Some day, though, the very fact of that song's evanescence may give rise to a great freestanding title. Here's one Reba McIntyre or Kathy Mat-tea could sing: “But He Knew No Words This Morning to the Tune He Sang Last Night.”

Anyway, you know what I did last night? I dreamed I went to Hillbilly Song Title Heaven. Actually it was more of a think tank: CITI, for Country International Title Institute.

“Why ‘International’?” I asked E. Kenneth Hicks, the director, who seemed (you know how dreams are) to be showing me around.

“Subtitles,” he said. “We have a whole division working full time translating classic titles into the languages of the world. It's one thing to come up with
‘Blutige Maria Morgen’—”

“‘Bloody Mary Morning,’” I said. “Not bad. Sounds more headachy than the original.”

“—or
‘Les Rues de Laredo.’
But try turning ‘Can't Have Your Kate and Edith, Too’ into Farsi, or ‘I'm Gonna Rent a U-Haul and Haul You All Away’ into Japanese.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “Especially getting the rhythm right and all.”

“And people who are experts in foreign languages don't always get American connotations. We had a Swiss whom we had to let go. You'd think he'd be the man to translate Ray Stevens's astrological yodel song, ‘O Leo Lady,’ but he sweated over it for weeks under the misapprehension that it was about margarine.”

“But surely you do more here than translate?”

“Indeed. Our main purpose is research and development. We break existing titles down into formulae, program those formulae into computers, and generate new titles scientifically.”

“How does that work?”

“I won't go into the technical aspects, but for instance in this room
here, we are producing titles that are about songs, along the lines of ‘Sad Songs and “Waltzes (Aren't Selling This Year)’ and ‘I Stopped Loving Cheating Songs Today.’ Here, here's a readout,” he said, and he showed me a long list that went on for pages and pages like this:

“Hmm,” I said. “I guess you have to generate lots and lots of them before one…”

He looked peeved. “You didn't like that last one?”

“The thing is, all those titles seemed to be about titles.”

“Yes,” Hicks said, “well, this work does get pretty specialized. Here, this is the OMSEID division, for Oughtn't Make Sense, Except It Does. Famous examples would be ‘One More Last Chance’ and “Your Wife Is Cheating on Us Again.’ Hey, Wayne, got any new OMSEID?”

A droopy-looking man wiped his brow with the back of his hand, got up from his workstation, and came over to us. “This one came through this morning: ‘Let's Be Together Forever Till Bobby Gets Out on Parole.’ ”

“I hear that,” said Hicks.

Wayne looked pensive. “Coley,” he said to his assistant, “anything new involving hearing?”

“ ‘I Can't Sleep for Hearing All the Things I Never Said,’ ” Coley said without even looking up from his console. “ ‘You Never Even Told Me We Weren't Speakin’ (I Had to Hear It from Strangers in Town).’ ‘I Try to Tell You You Don't Listen, but—’ Well, that last one still needs some tweaking.”

“That's enough, that's fine,” said Hicks. “Thanks, guys, keep up the good work.”

As Wayne shuffled back toward his cubicle, we could hear him muttering, “ ‘I Keep Keeping the Good Work Up

Coley finished for him: “ ‘…But It Keeps On Gettin’ Me Down.’ ”

“Your OMSEID people seem blue,” I said.

“Comes with the territory,” said Hicks. “And, of course, personnel of all departments are constantly coming up with songs about work.”

“Like ‘Take This Job and Shove It,’ ‘Nine to Five,’ ‘Working Man's PhD’?”

“This is not a game. And let's face it, ‘Whistle While You Work’ is not a country song.”

“That's almost a country title there,” I said. “ ‘ “Whistle While You Work” Is Not a Country Song.’ ”

“As a matter of fact, that's our motto. But don't think we have no fun around here. Let's look in on Noises and Spelling.”

“As in ‘I'd Write You a Letter but I Can't Spell
[Plppp]’
and ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E’?”

“Yes, and ‘The Last Word in Lonesome is “Me.”’ Shh. Just listen.”

He held open the door, a crack, to Noises and Spelling. At first, bedlam. Then as my ears became attuned, I could make out wisps of title— “‘Commitment’ Ain't a Four-Letter…,” “…N-O in My Book…,” “…Takin’ Dictation but Thinking
[smooching sound]”—
and, finally, whole titles:

“The Only Thing Our Kids Can Spell Is
[sobbing noise]
S-O-B.”

“I Miss Bein’ Mrs. B. N., But Billy Nix Don't Miss Me.”

“My Son Has Got This Eastern Religion (and Lost the First ‘M’ from His ‘MOM’ Tattoo).”

“But aren't those titles,” I said, “sort of …complicated?”

“Complicated? Complicated? After all, country music has been going on for quite some time. It ain't exactly a snap, coming up with one new title after another. Especially in these high-tech times. We are constantly updating: in the field of psychology, okay, we follow ‘(Call Me Cleopatra) I'm the Queen of Denial’ with ‘You Wouldn't Call Me Passive-Aggressive If You Knew How Much It Hurts.’ In the field of drinking, we follow ‘The Letter That Johnny Walker Read’ and ‘Rednecks, White Sox, and Blue Ribbon Beer’ with ‘Last Night I Forgot You Absolut'ly (It's Another Stoly Tonight)’ and ‘Your Name May Be Chardonnay (But There's Moonshine in Your Eyes).’ But it isn't always easy. You try working ‘information superhighway’ into an
uncomplicated
title.”

“ ‘That Long Lonesome…’ I see what you mean. But still, a lot of the best country titles are—”

“Simple,” said Hicks. “Yes, yes, yes. One or two or three words that speak volumes. We hear that all the time. ‘Come up with another “Almost Persuaded,”’ people say. ‘Give us something along the lines of “Mama Tried.” ’ ”

“Or ‘There Stands the Glass,’” I said, “Or ‘Born to Lose.’ Or, simplest of all—”

“I know what you're going to say! I know!” cried Hicks, and he began to grow irate and wobbly and vague. In a nightmarish sort of way, he became a terminal that began to rock, his face became a screen over which indecipherable pixels began to scroll, and then, just before
the entire dream imploded, one single word pulled itself up by its bootstraps:

BUSTED.

The dream was over. I lay there and pondered. “Busted.” John Conlee wrote it. And sang it, and so did Ray Charles. About being broke. Nothing tricky about it, and yet it's a better title than “You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly,” or “I'm Going to Hire a Wino to Redecorate Our Home,” or even “Don't Come Home a-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind).”

Enough titles! Somehow I felt that my dream had brought me tanta-lizingly close to the secret of great country music, and yet…

Then I remembered another brush with country music immortals. Back years before that title-writing night with Tom T., I had watched George Jones and Tammy Wynette record together, in Columbia Records’ famous Studio B in Nashville. I couldn't remember what they sang that day—something about how they weren't ever going to get back together again, probably. I did remember that George kept earnestly trying to talk Tammy into letting him give her a ride home, and she kept earnestly saying no.

And afterward I asked Tammy how she managed to get that little heart-wrenching break into her voice sometimes.

And Tammy astounded me. She said it was just something that happened in her vocal cords, after certain combinations of consonants and vowels.

Can that be all there is to vocal country greatness? Hardware and software interacting automatically? And great country titles just words rubbed against each other, one after another, until some of them get hooked?