Who looks at fallen leaves and thinks of lost love instead of hours of raking and bagging? A guy without a lawn, that’s who. Iconic lyricist Johnny Mercer spent most of his life in New York and Hollywood, so I doubt he ever heard a gas-powered leaf blower.
But then Mercer wasn’t working from scratch. He was adapting the lyrics of a French hit, “Les Feuilles Mortes” – the dead leaves. It first appeared, sung by Yves Montand, in a 1947 film. Though the movie flopped, Montand kept the song in his repertoire and recorded a million-selling version in 1949. That got the attention of Mercer, who was an old hand at dashing off lyrics to already existing melodies.
As owner of Capitol Records, he gave it to Jo Stafford to sing, but soon it was being recorded by everybody, and I mean everybody – there are more than 1,400 versions just by jazz musicians, and hundreds more by popular singers. When it reached No.1 in the U.S. in 1955, it was as an instrumental by pianist Roger Williams.
If falling leaves make me think of anything musical, it’s Eva Cassidy. For those unfamiliar with her story, Cassidy was a singer who was unknown outside her native Washington, D.C., when she died of cancer in 1996 at just 33 years old. She had recorded one live set at Blues Alley and released an LP from it a few months before her death, but had trouble finding a record contract because her genre-hopping style made her tough to market.
A posthumous second album, “Songbird,” was culled from unreleased recordings. It got little notice when it was released in 1997, but two years later BBC Radio 2 began playing tracks from it, and a video of her singing “Over the Rainbow” was aired on Top of the Pops. “Songbird” subsequently climbed to No. 1 in the UK, as did two later LPs of more unreleased material. Her star in Britain has never dimmed since – an album of her vocals with orchestral backing made the Top 10 there when it was released earlier this year.
Eva Cassidy died Nov. 2, 1996.
You don’t have to know any French to feel the world-weariness in Yves Montand’s original. The lyrics were originally a poem, not all of which fit the meter of the song, which is why it starts with a spoken section. If the image of dead leaves being shoveled from the street doesn’t make you wistful for a lost lover, well, maybe you need to spend more time in Paris.
