“Accentuate the positive” is of course a phrase made famous by lyricist Johnny Mercer, and today is the anniversary of his birth. “Accentuate the Positive” is a song in the guise of a sermon: “You’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and latch on to the affirmative, don’t mess with Mister In-between.”
Those lyrics are so familiar they have become a cliche, but they are followed by the preacher’s concrete, witty, unforgettable example (and a triple rhyme): “To illustrate my last remark, Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark, what did they do just when everything looked so dark?”
Among the 1,500 songs to which Mercer wrote the lyrics are “One For My Baby (And One More For the Road),” “P.S. I Love You” (not the Beatles song), “Something’s Gotta Give,” “This Time the Dream’s On Me,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Blues In the Night,” “Moon River” and “Satin Doll.” He was an utterly brilliant lyricist.
My personal favorite of Mercer’s songs is “Midnight Sun,” originally an instrumental by Lionel Hampton and Sonny Burke. Driving along the freeway from Newport Beach to Hollywood and back in 1955, Mercer heard the song on his car radio, called the station and asked the deejay to play the song again, memorized the melody, and wrote the lyrics in his head as he drove.
In his book The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, Philip Furia notes that in “Midnight Sun” Mercer pushed the oldest cliches of Tin Pan Alley to baroque extremes precisely as the Tin Pan Alley tradition was expiring: “Your lips were like a red and ruby chalice, warmer than the summer night./The clouds were like an alabaster palace rising to a snowy height./Each star its own aurora borealis,/suddenly you held me tight…I could see the Midnight Sun.” Furia writes: “It’s as if the lyric itself is a midnight sun, a last blaze of an Alley style extinguishing itself…”
-
-
Most Read on Power Line
Donate to PL
-
Our Favorites
- American Greatness
- American Mind
- American Story
- American Thinker
- Aspen beat
- Babylon Bee
- Belmont Club
- Churchill Project
- Claremont Institute
- Daily Torch
- Federalist
- Gatestone Institute
- Hollywood in Toto
- Hoover Institution
- Hot Air
- Hugh Hewitt
- InstaPundit
- Jewish World Review
- Law & Liberty
- Legal Insurrection
- Liberty Daily
- Lileks
- Lucianne
- Michael Ramirez Cartoons
- Michelle Malkin
- Pipeline
- RealClearPolitics
- Ricochet
- Steyn Online
- Tim Blair
Media
Subscribe to Power Line by Email
Temporarily disabled
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.