"THAT OLD BLACK MAGIC" (1942)

Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer collaborated on several film scores, and this jewel of a song was introduced in the 1942 film Star-Spangled Rhythm, a typical wartime all-star musical comedy intended to entertain the troops. The film starred many Paramount Studio contract players, including Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Betty Hutton, and Dorothy Lamour. "That Old Black Magic" was played behind the opening credits and then sung by Johnny Johnston, a big band singer who was popular in the 1940s and 1950s. While he sang, ballerina Vera Zorina performed a surrealistic dance number choreographed by her then husband, George Balanchine. Johnston also made a recording of the song that became one of Capitol Records’ first hits.
Margaret Whiting probably made the first recording of "That Old Black Magic" in 1942, but the first recording to reach the Billboard charts was made in 1943 by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra; it remained on the charts for 18 weeks and peaked in first place. However, Billy Daniels, a nightclub singer and Broadway/film star, probably did the most to bring notoriety to the song when he sang it in the 1950 film When You’re Smiling. He recorded his uptempo version for Mercury Records that reputedly sold over 12 million copies; it became his signature song. In 1975 he recorded it again in a disco version. From 1942 to 1961 the song appeared on the pop charts five more times. It even survived a very nutty treatment in 1946 by Spike Jones and His City Slickers, a band notorious for satirizing popular songs, often by employing animal noises, jarring whistles and cowbells, the sound of breaking glass and bizarre vocals. Many songs had trouble being taken seriously ever again after a Spike Jones treatment, but the sensuous melody and exotic lyrics of "That Old Black Magic" allowed it to emerge unscathed.
Johnny Mercer had two sources of inspiration for his lyrics to "That Old Black Magic". He got the idea that an entire song could be written about the bewitching power of love from Cole Porter’s 1929 hit, "You Do Something to Me", with its witty line "Do do that voodoo that you do to me." When collaborator Harold Arlen provided him with a complex 72-bar melody (it had to be that long to accommodate the dance sequence in the film) replete with octave drops and repeated notes, Mercer listened to it only once and then came back with "That Old Black Magic". In Philip Furia’s book Skylark: The Life and Times of Johnny Mercer, Arlen recalled his working relationship with Mercer: "Our working habits were strange. After we got a script and the spots for the songs were blocked out, we’d get together for an hour or so every day. While Johnny made himself comfortable on the couch, I’d play the tunes for him. …After I would finish playing the songs, he’d just go away without a comment. I wouldn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks, then he’d come around with the completed lyrics."
Mercer’s other inspiration for "That Old Black Magic" was his tempestuous love affair with Judy Garland. The affair began in 1941, when Garland was nineteen and trying to shed her "little Dorothy" image from the Wizard of Oz. Mercer was several years older, married and with a child, but he became intensely infatuated with her. On the advice of friends that the affair would damage her public image if it became known, Garland ended it by eloping with bandleader David Rose. She didn’t inform Mercer first, and he learned of the elopement from a Walter Winchell radio broadcast just as he had summoned the courage to ask his wife for a divorce. He was devastated by the news. The songs he wrote with Arlen at that time show a new poignancy and sadness, and it has been suggested that the depth of sorrow that suddenly appeared in his lyrics had to be related to the lose of Judy Garland. For example, one of the first songs Arlen and Mercer wrote together after this was "Blues in the Night", a blues lament sung by an imprisoned black man after he hears a distant train whistle.
Mercer stayed married to his wife for the rest of his life, even though his affair with Garland would flare up from time to time and they remained friends until her death of a drug overdose in 1969. The images in "That Old Black Magic" of icy fingers, plunging elevators, spinning leaves and burning lips vividly invoke the bewitchment Mercer experienced in their relationship. In the book America’s Songs, Philip Furia and William Lasser describe succinctly the impact of Mercer’s lyric: "That Old Black Magic" came as close as a song of its day could to celebrating the rapture of sex. Because of his love affair with Garland and his timely collaboration with Harold Arlen, Mercer’s lyric registers romantic agony and ecstasy as powerfully as any song in the history of American popular music."