AMONG my favourite song lyrics is this: “Dear, I thought I’d drop a line, the weather’s cool, the folks are fine; I’m in bed each night by nine: PS I love you.”

It continues: “Yesterday we had some rain, but on the whole I can’t complain. Was it dusty on the train? PS I love you.”

That’s by Johnny Mercer. He also wrote Accentuate The Positive, a phrase which has entered the language even if the song itself, like PS I Love You, is not all that well known.

But Mercer’s That Old Black Magic is well known, and, without Mercer’s words would Moon River, invariable credited to composer Henry Mancini, be one of the world’s best loved songs? “My Huckleberry friend” is a phrase of pure genius.

Mercer was among songwriters who came to my mind when I read that Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the first songwriter thus honoured.

Some people were sniffy about it.

My immediate thought was that if justice was to be done, the prize should also go posthumously to the top dozen or so songwriters who created The Great American Songbook.

For great it is – one of the finest bodies of words and music of the 20th Century. Someone once asked Sammy Cahn, another wonderful songwriter, which came first, the words or the music.

He replied: “First comes the telephone call.”

Very often the call to Cahn came from Frank Sinatra, from which it produced Come Fly With Me, Love and Marriage and many other classics in the Sinatra canon.

And no songwriter was quicker than Cahn to seize an opportunity.

Anticipating the end of World War II, he came up with the perfect homecoming song: “Just kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again, it’s been a long, long time.”

Before the Dylan award, the only nod I’d seen towards songwriting as ‘literature’ had gone to Cole Porter. His Let’s Do It appears in several poetry anthologies.

None of the often-brilliant parodies, from Noel Coward to Victoria Wood, outshines the original: “The most sedate barnyard fowls do it when a chanticleer cries; high-brow’d old owls do it – they’re supposed to be wise.” (And you don’t even often hear that sung!) Porter composed his own music too – to evergreens including Night and Day, I Get a Kick Out of You, and, most beautifully sung by Ella Fitzgerald, Every Time We Say Goodbye. Ira Gershwin collaborated with brother George to produce such lovely songs as Embraceable You, Someone to Watch Over Me and Our Love Is Here To Stay.

But the head of this glorious company is undoubtedly Irving Berlin.

The list of his hits could fill this page.

If Bing Crosby’s White Christmas is an annual annoyance, the reason Berlin’s song remains ubiquitous is that no other captures the season so simply yet perfectly.

And is Berlin’s How Deep Is The Ocean? the best love song ever?

I think so: “How much do I love you? I’ll tell you no lie. How deep is the ocean, how high is the sky? ... And if I ever lost you, how much would I cry? How deep is the ocean, how high is the sky?”

In my opinion, nothing by Bob Dylan comes close.