`The Ethos of Popular Music'

Another Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer collaboration shows up in Blues in the Night (1941), in the film’s final scene. The setting is a moving boxcar. Pricilla Lane belts out “Hang On To Your Lids, Kids.” That’s pre-Streetcar Elia Kazan as Nicky on clarinet. Jimmie Lunceford and His Band show up elsewhere. This is from Mercer’s first refrain:

“Why say

That we’re on the ropes?

I say

`Hang on to your hopes, dopes!’

“So what if we’re in a spin?

That’s really where we came in,

We’re livin’ and that ain’t tin.

Hang on to your lids, kids,

Here we go again.”

And this concludes the second refrain:

“Ben Franklin said it all.

`Divided, we gotta fall—

United, we’ll have a ball!’

Hang on to your lids, kids,

Here we go again.”

I quote this good-natured fluff, misattribution and all, because of what Alec Wilder says about it in American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 (1972): “I’m so glad that Mercer was able to get his cheery point of view around, as in the lines `Why say that we’re on the ropes? I say `Hang on to your hopes, dopes!’” Even better, Wilder says of this first “very felicitous” Arlen/Mercer collaboration:

“They were not only two men who had been professional singers but they were profound lovers of jazz. Besides which, and most important, their love of the lonely and sentimental, the witty and the warm and the bittersweet, all part of the ethos of popular music, tended to make them work like a single mind.”

[Lyrics quoted from The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), edited by Robert Kimball, Barry Day, Miles Kreuger and Eric Davis.]