With her son evidencing so strong a musical bent his mother could do little else but get him started on the study of music -- though she waited until he was ten -- beginning with the piano and following that with the trumpet. Young Mercer showed a remarkable lack of aptitude for both instruments. Still, he did like music making and even sang in the chapel choir of the Woodberry Forest School, near Orange, Virginia, where he sounded fine but did not matriculate too well.

When he was fifteen John H. Mercer turned out his first song, a jazzy little thing he called ``Sister Susie, Strut Your Stuff.'' If his scholarship and formal musicianship were not all they might have been, Mercer demonstrated at an early age that he was gifted with a remarkable ear for rhythm and dialect. From his playmates in Savannah, Mercer had picked up, along with a soft Southern dialect, traces also of the Gullah dialects of Africa. Such speech differences made him acutely aware of the richness and expressivness of language.

During the summers, while he was still in school, Mercer worked for his father's firm as a messenger boy. It generally took well into the autumn for the firm to recover from the summer's help. ``We'd give him things to deliver, letters, checks, deeds and things like that,'' remembers his half-brother Walter, still in the real estate business in savannah, ``and learn days later that he'd absent-mindedly stuffed them into his pocket. There they stayed.''