Mabel Mercer was born in Staffordshire, England. After leaving a Manchester convent school at the age of fourteen, Mercer joined her aunt in a vaudeville and music hall tour of Britain and the Continent. Her career quickly flowered, and by the 1930s she was the toast of Paris.
The outbreak of World War II brought her to America where she began a series of engagements at New York's finest supper clubs. Mercer solidified her career with engagements at the Carlyle and St. Regis Hotels, and she enjoyed brilliant concert triumphs and record-breaking appearances across the United States.
To honor her 75th birthday in 1975, Atlantic Records assembled four classic early LPs and reissued them in a boxed set. In recognition of her life's achievement, Stereo Review Magazine presented Miss Mercer with its first Award of Merit for "outstanding contributions to the quality of American musical life." In 1984, the Award of Merit was officially renamed the Mabel Mercer Award.
After an absence of 41 years, Miss Mercer made her long-awaited return to England in 1977, accompanied by her long-time friend and publicist, Donald Smith. So great was the public acclaim on her return to London that the BBC filmed three evenings of extraordinary footage of Miss Mercer's performances.
In 1978, Miss Mercer's new album, Midnight at Mabel Mercer's, was hailed by Stereo Review as one of the best recordings of the past twenty years. To celebrate her 78th birthday later that year, Mercer played a sold-out engagement at San Francisco's Club Mocambo to enthusiastic audiences.
Mabel Mercer was honored in 1981 by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York with An American Cabaret, the first musical celebration of its kind in the museum's history. Mercer next appeared as the first guest on Eileen Farrell's new National Public Radio program featuring great popular singers. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan presented Mabel Mercer with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony.
For over thirty years, Mabel Mercer was a resident of Columbia County, New York. She lived in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains where she enjoyed the abundance of wildlife and birds in the midst of several acres of flowers and trees that surrounded her country home. On Miss Mercer's birthday, the year after her death, 1985, The Mabel Mercer Foundation was formally established.
