- Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume One, 1981-1985, pages 558-560. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998.
- In the late 1960s, she gave two concerts with Bobby Short at Town Hall in New York City. Both were released by Atlantic Records: Mabel Mercer & Bobby Short at Town Hall, in 1968, (Atlantic SD 2-604) and Mabel Mercer & Bobby Short Second Town Hall Concert, in 1969 (Atlantic SD 2-605).
- She was awarded Stereo Review Magazine's first Award for Merit, for her lifetime achievement and for "outstanding contributions to the quality of American musical life." This award was officially renamed the Mabel Mercer Award in 1984.
- In 1928, she was an unknown member of the black chorus in the London production of Show Boat,[2] but she had become the toast of Paris by the 1930s, with admirers who included Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Cole Porter.
- In 1985, the Mabel Mercer Foundation was established with the efforts of her long-time friend and professional associate Donald F. Smith. This not-for-profit arts organization was formed to keep Mercer's memory alive, and to contribute to the art of cabaret performing by supporting artists and providing information resources. Its international activities include the debut of the London Cabaret Convention in 2004. The Foundation produced Noël Coward's 100th birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall. It also has a Young Person's Series to introduce young people to The Great American Songbook of popular classics.
- Billie Holiday almost lost a job singing on West 52d Street because she spent so much time at a club across the street, listening to Mabel Mercer.
- In 1969, she made two appearances on the television program Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
- Her recording career began in 1942, with an album of selections from Porgy and Bess,[2] on the elite Liberty Music Shops label, featuring piano accompaniment by Cy Walter.
- At the age of 14, she left her convent school in Manchester, and toured Britain and Europe with her aunt in vaudeville and music hall engagements.
- Although Mabel Mercer never gave singing lessons, even informally, the ''students'' who have learned by listening to her have included many of the most prominent singers of popular music. ''Mabel Mercer taught me everything I know,'' Frank Sinatra once said, and, in an admiring letter to Miss Mercer, he called her ''the best music teacher in the world.''.
- Johnny Mathis admired her so much that when he was playing an engagement at the Uris Theater several years ago, he urged audiences who were clamoring for another encore from him to go to hear Miss Mercer, who was then singing at the St. Regis Hotel.
- Mercer received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the US's highest civilian medal, in 1983. When President Ronald Reagan presented it to her in a ceremony at the White House, he called her "a singer's singer" and "a living testament to the artfulness of the American song".
- When Mercer returned on 4 July 1977 for her first performance in England in 41 years, the BBC filmed three evenings' performances and later broadcast them in a week-long late-night television program, a BBC first for an entertainer. It was titled Miss Mercer in Mayfair.
- Her precise vocal styling was believed to be the result of diction training while a student at the convent.
- She was a featured performer at Chez Bricktop in Paris, owned by the hostess Bricktop, and performed in such clubs as Le Ruban Bleu, Tony's, the RSVP, the Carlyle, the St. Regis Hotel, and eventually her own room, the Byline Club.
- Her mother was a young, white English music hall performer, and her father was an itinerant black American musician, who died before she was born.
- In January 1981, she was honoured by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York with "An American Cabaret," the only musical event of its kind at that point in the museum's history.
- Over the following decades, Mercer made many concert appearances across the U.S.
- Her original and reissued albums are collector's items. Atlantic Records reissued four of her early LPs in a boxed set in 1975, in honor of her 75th birthday.
- In 1978, Midnight at Mabel Mercer's, her 1956 album on Atlantic, was praised as "one of the best recordings of the past twenty years" (although it was more than 20 years old at the time) by Stereo Review. That same year, Mercer played at San Francisco's Club Mocambo to sold-out audiences, in celebration of her 78th birthday.
- In 1982, Mercer teamed up with her friend Eileen Farrell in concert as part of the Kool Jazz Festival. Mercer was also the first guest on Eileen Farrell's new program on National Public Radio featuring great popular singers.
- When World War II broke out, she travelled to America to sing in the finest supper clubs in New York.
- Among those who frequently attended Mercer's shows was Frank Sinatra, who made no secret of his emulating her phrasing and story-telling techniques.
- She also received two honorary Doctor of Music degrees: one from Boston's Berklee College of Music, the other from the New England Conservatory of Music.
- She was an English-born cabaret singer who performed in the United States, Britain, and Europe with the greats in jazz and cabaret.
- Mercer delivered her stories with a quiet, unaffected precision that once prompted a professor of English at the University of California to use her records in his classes to demonstrate fine diction.
- Nat (King) Cole, Barbara Cook and Bobby Short were singers who studied her work. ''She was the guiding light of my career,'' said Bobby Short, who later gave concerts with her in Carnegie Hall and Town Hall.
- Although she quickly developed a devoted following, MabelMercer insisted that she was an acquired taste. ''People have to hear me two or three times before they like me,'' she said. ''I grow on them like a barnacle.''.
- Although Mabel Mercer, spent all her life as a performer, she was to the end a private and somewhat shy person.
- As she became older, her voice, which had been soprano, deepened and sometimes became a bit uncertain. As the voice went lower, she felt she had to compensate for notes that she could no longer sing securely. But she found a bright side to this. ''It gave me a better chance to talk the story of a song,'' she recalled. 'A Graceful Parlando'.
- When she came to the United States in 1938 and sang from a stage, she was seated in a high- backed armchair with her hands folded in her lap, looking benevolently regal. This became her customary manner of performing.
- I've always been shy of singing,'' she said. ''It's a great surprise to me when people say nice things. I can't bear to listen to myself. I won't listen to my own records.''.
- Mercer was also admired by songwriters, who appreciated the taste and interpretive skills she brought to their songs. Alec Wilder, whose ''While We're Young'' was introduced by Mabel Mercer, called her ''the guardian of the tenuous dreams created by writers of songs.'' She also introduced ''Fly Me to the Moon'' by Bart Howard, one of a coterie of young songwriters who gathered around her.
- She began singing in Paris after World War I when a male quartet that had lost a tenor asked her to fill in. After the quartet broke up, Miss Mercer continued singing on her own in Paris at Chez Florence and Le Grand Duke and, in the 1930's, at Bricktop's, the celebrated cabaret where Cole Porter had a permanent table. It was at Bricktop's that she found the communicative advantages of singing while seated.
- Mercer is credited with keeping alive an impressive list of songs that might otherwise have been forgotten. For almost a decade, for example, she was almost the only performer singing the Richard Rodgers-Moss Hart ''Little Girl Blue.'' Eventually, other singers who had heard her do it - Frank Sinatra, Margaret Whiting and Lena Horne - recorded and popularized the song to the extent that it is now regarded as an imperishable standard.
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