MABEL MERCER, PHRASER OF SONGS, DIES
By JOHN S. WILSON APRIL 21, 1984
April 21, 1984.
The New York Times Archives
Mabel Mercer, whose influence on popular music over the last half century reached far beyond the audiences who heard her sing in the intimate rooms where she usually performed, died yesterday in the Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Mass. She was 84 years old.
Miss Mercer, who had been suffering from un-stabilized angina, died of respiratory arrest. She lived in East Chatham, N.Y., in a farmhouse she bought more than 30 years ago.
Although Miss Mercer never gave singing lessons, even informally, the ''students'' who have learned by listening to her have included many of the most prominent singers of popular music. ''Mabel Mercer taught me everything I know,'' Frank Sinatra once said, and, in an admiring letter to Miss Mercer, he called her ''the best music teacher in the world.''
It was Miss Mercer's phrasing and her ability to convey the emotional sense of a lyric that attracted other singers and songwriters.
Billie Holiday almost lost a job singing on West 52d Street because she spent so much time at a club across the street, listening to Miss Mercer. Nat (King) Cole, Barbara Cook and Bobby Short were other singers who studied her work in the same manner. ''She was the guiding light of my career,'' said Mr. Short, who later gave concerts with her in Carnegie Hall and Town Hall. Mathis Sent Fans to Hear Her
Johnny Mathis admired her so much that when he was playing an engagement at the Uris Theater several years ago, he urged audiences who were clamoring for another encore from him to go to hear Miss Mercer, who was then singing at the St. Regis Hotel.
Miss Mercer was equally admired by songwriters, who appreciated the taste and interpretive skills she brought to their songs. Alec Wilder, whose ''While We're Young'' was introduced by Miss Mercer, called her ''the guardian of the tenuous dreams created by writers of songs.'' She also introduced ''Fly Me to the Moon'' by Bart Howard, one of a coterie of young songwriters who gathered around her.
Miss Mercer is credited with keeping alive an impressive list of songs that might otherwise have been forgotten. For almost a decade, for example, she was almost the only performer singing the Richard Rodgers-Moss Hart ''Little Girl Blue.'' Eventually, other singers who had heard her do it - Mr. Sinatra, Margaret Whiting and Lena Horne - recorded and popularized the song to the extent that it is now regarded as an imperishable standard. Similarly, she sustained the Arthur Schwartz-Howard Dietz song ''By Myself'' from 1938 until it reached a wider audience in 1954, when Fred Astaire sang it in the film ''The Band Wagon,'' and she salvaged the Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields song ''Remind Me'' from an Abbott and Costello film, ''One Night in the Tropics.'' A Private, Shy Person
Although Miss Mercer, who was born on Feb. 3, 1900, in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England, spent all her life as a performer, she was to the end a private and somewhat shy person.
I've always been shy of singing,'' she said. ''It's a great surprise to me when people say nice things. I can't bear to listen to myself. I won't listen to my own records.''
She never knew her father, a black American who died before she was born. Her mother was a white British vaudeville singer and actress whose family was in show business.
''I was the most self-conscious child,'' Miss Mercer remembered a few years ago. ''I don't know how I ever became an entertainer. It was absolute agony at school when I was called on to recite a poem or something. I would turn scarlet, my knees would knock and my lips would tremble so that I could hardly pronounce the words. And there I was, the child of performers and I couldn't get over it. Horrible, horrible. Even now when I'm going to sing a new song or appear in a new place, I get stomach aches up to here.''
At 14, she became a dancer in her family's music-hall act. She began singing in Paris after World War I when a male quartet that had lost a tenor asked her to fill in. After the quartet broke up, Miss Mercer continued singing on her own in Paris at Chez Florence and Le Grand Duke and, in the 1930's, at Bricktop's, the celebrated cabaret where Cole Porter had a permanent table. It was at Bricktop's that she found the communicative advantages of singing while seated. How the Style Evolved
''People would say, 'Come over here and sing such-and-such a song,' '' she once recalled. ''So I'd sit down next to their table and sing. I had to learn not to stare at them when I sang because it made them uncomfortable. So I developed an impersonal thing of not really looking at anybody but just concentrating on the story of the song.''
Miss Mercer delivered her stories with a quiet, unaffected precision that once prompted a professor of English at the University of California to use her records in his classes to demonstrate fine diction. When she came to the United States in 1938 and sang from a stage, she was seated in a high- backed armchair with her hands folded in her lap, looking benevolently regal. This became her customary manner of performing.
Her first engagement in New York was at Le Ruban Bleu, followed by several years at Tony's on 52d Street during the 1940's. She also sang at the Byline Room, Downstairs at the Upstairs, the St. Regis Hotel and the Cafe Carlyle.
Although she quickly developed a devoted following, Miss Mercer insisted that she was an acquired taste. ''People have to hear me two or three times before they like me,'' she said. ''I grow on them like a barnacle.''
As she became older, her voice, which had been soprano, deepened and sometimes became a bit uncertain. As the voice went lower, she felt she had to compensate for notes that she could no longer sing securely. But she found a bright side to this. ''It gave me a better chance to talk the story of a song,'' she recalled. 'A Graceful Parlando'
This resulted in a delivery that Mr. Wilder described as ''a graceful parlando.'' Some others were not so kind. ''People say, 'Why she can't sing for toffee!' '' Miss Mercer said. ''I say, 'I know that - I'm telling a story.' ''
In 1977, after giving a concert in Carnegie Hall, Miss Mercer appeared for the first time in 40 years in London, where she also starred in a five-part BBC television film, ''Miss Mercer in Mayfair.'' In 1979, she seemingly went into retirement, but she emerged again in 1982 to sing at the Kool Jazz Festival. She took part in a concert of music by the late Mr. Wilder and shared a program with Eileen Farrell, singing solos and duets. She gave her final performance last November at a benefit for the SLE Foundation, which combats lupus.
Miss Mercer received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983, from President Reagan. Last January, Stereo Review Magazine's Award of Merit, of which Miss Mercer was the first recipient a decade ago, was renamed the Mabel Mercer Award and was given to Frank Sinatra.
Miss Mercer's brief marriage, to the jazz musician Kelsey Pharr, ended in divorce. There are no close survivors.
The body will be at the Wenk Funeral Home in Chatham on Monday, with viewing from 2 to 4 P.M. and from 7 to 9 P.M. A mass will be celebrated in St James Roman Catholic Church in Chatham Tuesday at 2 P.M.