You don’t have to pretend that you know the name Sadie Vimmerstedt, much less pronounce it. Sadie was a mother and grandmother who worked in a cosmetics store in Youngstown, Ohio, and loved music, especially the songs of Johnny Mercer.
Around 1957, the story of Frank Sinatra leaving his first wife, Nancy, for Ava Gardner, then Ava dropping Frank for a bullfighter, was splashed across front pages around the world. That public drama inspired Sadie Vimmerstedt to pick up a pen and write two lines: “I want to be around to pick up the pieces / When somebody breaks your heart.”
She put the two lines in an envelope that she addressed to: “Johnny Mercer, Songwriter, Los Angeles, California.” The US Postal Service, no doubt through rain, sleet, and dark of night, routed it to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, which deals in music rights. They routinely routed it to Johnny.
Fishermen, San Francisco
Johnny read the lines. He liked them so much, in fact, that he wrote the song, both the music and the lyrics. He asked me to record it, and in 1963, “I Wanna Be Around” became one of my biggest hits ever.
Johnny Mercer gave Sadie Vimmerstedt a big slice of the royalties—so much that she could leave Youngstown and spend the rest of her life traveling to the places she’d only heard about in songs, like Paris and Rome. I’d get postcards from Sadie from all over the world.
By the way: Frank recorded a cover version the next year. I don’t know if he realized that, in a way, he had already contributed to the song.
People often ask me, “Where are the new Tony Bennetts?” But I wonder, when it comes to people who know and love quality popular songs, “Where are the new Sadie Vimmerstedts?”
Paris