One evening in 1941, while Hollywood pros Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer were working on the score of a passable Warner Brothers vehicle entitled Hot Nocturne, they cranked out a required “blues” number, drove over to a friend’s house and barged in on her dinner party that included Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney and Mel Tormé, sat down at the piano and played it. “That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard,” Garland exclaimed, “Play it again!” The song, “Blues In The Night”, became the name of the film, an instant hit, and is widely acknowledged as a landmark in the evolution of American popular music principally because of Mercer’s easy use of idiom. In this, the 100th anniversary of his birth, we pay tribute to Mercer's Hollywood years, with an evening of his best from 1936’s “I’m an Old Cowhand” through his work in thr ‘60s with Henry Mancini (“Moon River”) and into the 1970s.