Gettin’ a Glow On in Mercer’s Savannah (NY Times)

From the New York Times:

By JAY ATKINSON
Published: January 29, 2010

Although Johnny Mercer had a stint writing in New York and then moved to Hollywood, in his cadences and sensibility he never really departed from the quaint, colloquial melodic influences of his home ground — the same ones that inhabited Mr. Gray’s barroom tale.

Thanks to an uncharacteristic gesture of restraint by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who incinerated a swath of Georgia during the Civil War, there was a Savannah for Johnny Mercer to grow up in. In the cold morning sunshine the cobblestone boulevards of old Savannah, which was founded in 1733, look much as they did in Mercer’s youth, during the 1920s and ’30s.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/travel/escapes/29mercer.html?ref=travel