Pocket Full of Dreams
Local crooner Sandy Merrill revives a style of singing that hasn’t been heard in Nashville for decades
By Robert L. Doerschuk
Sandy Merrill
Performing with the
BlackWire Orchestra
8 p.m. June 19 at Douglas Corner Cafe. $10
Merrill also performs 7-9 p.m. Thursdays at Cafe 123
“Was it something I said?!” Right hand outstretched, tie askew, bald head glistening under overhead lights, Sandy Merrill leans toward the couple tiptoeing toward the front door at Cafe 123. His body seems to defy gravity, as if someone had nailed his shoes to the floor. It’s an entertainer’s illusion, a trick of positioning that pulls the audience’s gaze away from the microphone, down the line of his arm out into the room and onto the backs of the two customers now in flight for 12th Avenue.
And then everyone looks back toward Merrill. He’s holding the pose, his expression perplexed, but with a comic edge that makes it clear that, not to worry, nothing’s wrong, this is just part of the act. Then, slowly, he pulls back, straightens up, his right hand turned now into a parting wave, his face relaxed and then tightened again, this time into a blinding smile, wide enough to be seen all the way back at the end of the bar.
“All kidding aside,” he says, “have a great night. Thanks for coming.... My name is Sandy Merrill.”
Go wherever you like in this town, you’ll hear a lot of music. But nowhere will you hear anyone who sounds like Sandy Merrill. To find even a faint musical resemblance, you would have to travel back in time, to when a young Dinah Shore was entertaining at the Hermitage Hotel and Snooky Lanson was crooning over WSM on his way to a regular slot on Your Hit Parade. For that matter, up until recently, you wouldn’t even have heard Merrill himself. For 17 of his 18 years in Nashville, he wasn’t getting any work at all.
The problem was that his style had little precedent here. Growing up a few blocks from Wrigley Field in Chicago, the son of a doctor and the respected opera mezzo Mildred Gerber, he lived for show tunes—specifically, show tunes interpreted through a fusion of jazz and Jewish antecedents. Today, you hear this kind of music only in soundtracks for nostalgic period movies, late-night pitches for Rat Pack compilations or smarmy satirical paraphrase by Paul Shaffer.
For Merrill, though, this music—Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Mercer, as sung by Vic Damone, Steve Lawrence or Frankie Laine—is timeless and therefore never out of fashion. “I didn’t read about it,” he says over coffee one afternoon at Star Bagel. “I lived it. I fell in love with it one day, when my grandmother took me to the Chicago Theater to hear [pianist] Carmen Cavallero. I can still see it: The curtains part, and this 20-piece orchestra comes out at you, like this”— Merrill rises to a crouch, his arms spreading along the lines of his recollection. “And all of a sudden, there’s a piano there too, and the piano moves out like this”—a grand, sweeping glide—”toward the audience, on its own! And I’m going, 'Wow! That’s what I want to do!’ “
After years of voice training, after making his debut at the Crown Room in Indianapolis, after picking up engagements around Chicago and singing with Si Zentner’s Orchestra, Merrill watched as this world he had just come to conquer dissolved. The supper clubs slashed their budgets, rock took over, and as gigs dried up, he decided that the only way he could stay in the business would be to take his chances in Nashville.
“I had written for The J’s With Jamie, and with Jerry Butler and some others, so I figured I could write,” he explains. “That’s why I came to Nashville—only problem was, they weren’t looking for my kind of songs. I was this cog that couldn’t fit into this wheel. I mean, you wouldn’t believe how many calls I didn’t get!”
From his arrival in 1985 up until last year, Merrill didn’t perform anywhere and instead paid the rent working as a waiter or a substitute teacher, making subscription calls for The Tennessean, and doing other odd jobs. He haunted writer hangouts—Third Coast, Tavern on the Row. Raised in the Reform Judaism tradition, he found strength and cultivated patience through joining the Orthodox Sherith Israel congregation on West End.
All the while, he kept writing, with a meticulous discipline that feels almost archaic nowadays. “I was reading Pocket Full of Dreams, the Gary Giddins book about Bing Crosby,” Merrill says, “and there was this line, 'If the best man is the best man, why do the brides always marry the groom?’ I went, 'That’s a song!’ But something bothered me about the timing, so I worked it into, 'If the best man...is the best man’—then, into a quick double-time—’why does the bride get mar-ried to the groom?’ So I’ve got it, but it doesn’t pay off until, all of a sudden, I heard: 'But every wedding I’ve been to, they always have a ball. I guess the best man’s really not the best man after all.’ Boom! Done.”
Two events this year have finally turned the corner for Merrill. He began singing big band and original material with BlackWire, a string quartet with a rhythm section, led by local violist Linda Davis, whose repertoire otherwise features chamber arrangements of progressive rock classics. They’ve appeared several times recently at Douglas Corner and at the Lakeside Chautauqua on Lake Erie, between Cleveland and Toledo. Their music caught the ear of Jody Faison, who started booking Merrill at Cafe 123 on Thursday nights, currently with pianist Charles Mandt.
“I don’t know any true refugee from the lounge era in Nashville other than Sandy,” Faison says, “especially among male singers. Most of the ladies who are singing jazz here are picking up that old thread, but Sandy’s been living on that thread his whole life.”
As for Merrill himself, he sees his Nashville diaspora as—no surprise—good material for a song. The title “Old Violins” was inspired by a sign in a storefront on Chicago’s Rush Street. Starting with the middle section, he sings a soft-focus melody: “Looking back at times I’ve had and things I’ve done, I’ve learned to make each step I take one by one. I made it through and somehow grew through it all, just like an old violin.”
“And here’s the last verse,” he says. “It took me 18 years to get it to say what I wanted: 'Of all the things I could have been, I’ve been myself. And there were times no one was buying what I had to sell. But I believe the good has stood for itself, just like an old violin.”
Lights, curtain, out.
Lights, curtain, out.
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