The “Moon River” I speak of is the river Audrey Hepburn sang of in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I’ve always loved that song. I remember that my mama bought me the Andy Williams’ album with his cover of that song. Later on, I bought an 8 track tape – remember those? – The Best of Henry Mancini that had his instrumental version on it. The song was composed by Mancini with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. And it’s Mercer that leads me to tell the tale of an actual body of water called Moon River.

Johnny Mercer was an American lyricist, composer and singer who also co-founded Capitol Records. He wrote the lyrics to more than fifteen hundred songs and received nineteen Academy Award nominations, winning four Best Original Song Oscars, one of which was “Moon River”. And it was just recently that we visited the city of his birth, Savannah, Georgia, though I had no idea that it was his birthplace.

I discovered that when we went on a walking tour and saw a statue and an embedded plaque honoring him in Ellis Square, near the City Market. There’s also a Johnny Mercer Bench in Johnson Square, with names of many of his famous songs inscribed on it as well as a self portrait and signature inscribed on the top seat part. There is also a copy of this bench at his gravesite in Bonaventure Cemetery.

As for the squares, the city was laid out originally in 1733 around four open squares. Other squares were added over the years and there are now 24 squares in the city named in honor of a person, or historical event, and many contain monuments, markers, memorials, statues, plaques, as evidenced by the tributes to Mercer.

I was surprised to see the names of many of those songs. I was very familiar with them but unaware that he had written them. Other than “Moon River,” the other three Oscar-winning songs were “The Days of Wine and Roses,””In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening,” and “On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.”

Other familiar songs inscribed on the bench are “Autumn Leaves,” “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive,” “Hooray for Hollywood,” “That Old Black Magic,” “You Mush Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” “Jeepers Creepers,” and another of my all-time favorites, “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).” Other very familiar songs he wrote were “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” and, much to my surprise, two very famous and familiar Christmas songs, “Jingle Bells” and “Winter Wonderland”.

But other than the statue of Mercer at Ellis Square, and the benches at Johnson Square and the cemetery, an inlet near Savannah was named Moon River in honor of him and his song. I was unaware of that while there or we would have visited just so to be able to say that we’d been to Moon River. But the song itself is reminiscent of his childhood and the surrounding waterways of Savannah where as a child he had picked huckleberries, reminding him of his carefree early years and Huckleberry Finn, leading to those memorable lines in “Moon River”:

We’re after the same rainbow’s end, Waitin’ ’round the bend, My huckleberry friend, Moon River, and me

Maybe next time for I’d sure love to return to this lovely and fascinating city.