Review
Genre and Mood
Henry Mancini wrote the music and Audrey Hepburn sings it: this Moon River is film music and a ballad at its smallest, one voice and a guitar. It is dreamy, as Far Out hears her breathy rendition; longing, because the critic Robert Wright called the song a love sung to wanderlust; and nostalgic, because Johnny Mercer built the lyric from the waterways of his own childhood.
Song Summary
Mancini and Mercer were brought together by the director Blake Edwards to write a song for Hepburn to sing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Mercer’s first title was “Blue River”; his lyric recalls Savannah, Georgia, and the huckleberries he picked there as a boy, which became the song’s “huckleberry friend”. Mancini fitted the melody to the singer. “I knew how wide her range was and I wrote the song accordingly,” he said in Tokyo in 1975, adding that she did it better than anyone who had sung it since.
Musical Breakdown
The sources describe the recording as a whole, so this breakdown follows the scene it was made for.
Intro
In the film, Holly Golightly sits on her fire escape with a guitar; her neighbour, played by George Peppard, hears her from above and goes out to listen.
Main Section
The song unfolds as what Will Friedwald calls a lovely waltz, somewhat reminiscent of a folk song: a simple melody for an actress with a very small range, suggestive of a tune a child might learn. Hepburn sings it softly, accompanying herself on the guitar.
Outro
No source describes how this recording ends; listen for how little changes between the first line and the last.
Concepts in Focus
As soundtrack music, Moon River shows how a song can be built for one moment on screen. An instrumental version plays over the opening titles; Hepburn’s version is the scene itself. Paramount’s filmmakers had thought they would need to dub another voice over hers, and after a tepid preview the executive Martin Rackin suggested cutting the song. Hepburn’s answer is reported in versions ranging from “Over my dead body!” to something cruder, and the song stayed.
The song soon lived outside the film. Mancini’s own orchestral single, recorded without Hepburn, reached number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the cover version by Andy Williams, first recorded in 1962, became his theme. Next to a polished version, this one shows how much the song’s intimacy depends on its singer; compare James Newton Howard, Jennifer Lawrence – The Hanging Tree.
Artistic Context
Johnny Mercer’s songwriting career, stalled in the mid-1950s when rock and roll displaced the standards, was relaunched by the song’s success. Hepburn’s vocal was released on record only in 1993, after her death, on Music from the Films of Audrey Hepburn; the version here is credited to Mancini with Hepburn’s vocal on the compilation Champagne for the Private Eye.
Impact and Reception
Moon River won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and at the 1962 Grammys it took Song of the Year, with Mancini’s recording named Record of the Year. In 2004 the American Film Institute placed Hepburn’s version fourth in its 100 Years…100 Songs. Listen to it once without picturing the film.
