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From time to time on the radio show I like to tease my guests by asking them to identify the songs from which ‘detached lyrics’ come. I like to think that disconnected from the music and the context, they may be hard to source. Recently, a listener suggested that I put the phrase ‘My huckleberry friend’ as a question.

The answer was soon forthcoming that it was from Johnny Mercer’s lyric for ‘Moon River’. He wrote the words and Henry Mancini the music for the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (US 1961). Famously, the head of production at Paramount told Blake Edwards, the director, ‘The song has got to go’. It didn’t and went on to win an Oscar for best song.

But what about the ‘huckleberry’ phrase? I rather assumed it was an allusion to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn which is about two friends and what they did on a river but, if anything, Twain’s name for his hero is doing the alluding to the actual source.

One’s ‘huckleberry’ has several meanings but in particular refers to ‘the very person for a particular requirement; the right person’ and as such has been around probably since the American Civil War and definitely since the 1880s. Similarly, it is an American tradition to pick huckleberries (a type of blueberry) in the school holidays with your very best friend.

So that’s what a ‘huckleberry friend’ is. I believe that Johnny Mercer once explained in an interview that the line was an allusion to his own childhood happiness and innocence. Well, you learn things all the time. I also discovered that there is an actual Moon River in Savannah, Georgia, and Mercer had a house overlooking it. (Q3680)

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© 2007 by Nigel Rees