“For every man who sits in the bath and sings the words,” the English jazz critic Benny Green once wrote, “there are twenty who walk in the streets and whistle the melody.” Just so; when Ella Fitzgerald created the pantheon of Tin Pan Alley with her celebrated “Songbook” series, the first seven records paid tribute to composers: Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, and Jerome Kern. The last entry was the only one to showcase a lyricist: Johnny Mercer. In the opinion of his peers, it was a tribute fully deserved. “He’s not just a lyricist, he’s a songwriter,” Berlin declared. “Johnny Mercer is a great, great songwriter.”

“Blues in the Night” and “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” are among America’s finest popular songs. The words are Johnny Mercer’s, as are those for “That Old Black Magic,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “And the Angels Sing,” “Day In—Day Out” and “On the Atchinson, Topeka and the Santa Fe.” (Mercer may inspire more “He wrote that?” moments that any other artist from the golden age of popular song.) He received eighteen Academy Award nominations for best song and took home four Oscars. (The last two, in 1961 and 1962, were shared with Henry Mancini, the first songwriting team to win in successive years.) His first popular success, “Lazybones,” came in 1933; in the 1960s, Mercer was