Hoagy Carmichael: A Stardust Memory

(L-R) Hoagy Carmichael plays the piano in a publicity shot for "The Best Years of Our Lives," with Frederick March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, and Theresa Wright. Public Domain

The Great American Songbook—the 20th-century’s canon of favorites—is replete with songs celebrating life, romance, and high society. But one esteemed songwriter gained renown for “home-and-hearth” songs that dealt with simpler themes like the longing for home, moonlit rivers, and a nightingale’s song.

Hoagland Howard Carmichael (1899–1981) of Bloomington, Indiana, came from different family and musical roots than notable songwriters like George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Oscar Hammerstein. The latter were first- and second-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe who grew up with the diverse sounds and urban bustle of New York City. Carmichael grew up in a small Midwestern town surrounded by towering forests, golden wheat fields, and cloudless blue skies.

Biographer Richard M. Sudhalter wrote that Carmichael’s songs “can evoke place and time as vividly as the work of Edward Hopper or Sinclair Lewis, the essays of H.L. Mencken, or the humor of Will Rogers.”

Despite his hardscrabble youth and lack of formal piano instruction, Carmichael is credited with composing four of the most beloved and timeless songs included in the Great American Songbook: “Stardust (1927),” “Georgia on My Mind (1930),” “The Nearness of You (1938),” and “Skylark (1941).”

Hoagy Carmichael's childhood home still stands on Dunn St. in Bloomington, Ind. Public Domain

A New Discovery

Hoagland Howard Carmichael, affectionately known as “Hoagy,” was born at home in a four-bedroom cottage on Nov. 22, 1899, in Bloomington, Indiana. He was named for the Hoaglands, a traveling troupe of circus people who got stranded in Bloomington and were taken in by Carmichael’s parents, Howard Clyde Carmichael and his mother, Lida Robison Carmichael, pregnant with him at the time.

Carmichael’s father ran horse-drawn taxis and later worked as an itinerant electrician after the emergence of automobiles. His mother was an accomplished pianist and ragtime aficionado. She augmented the meager family budget by improvising piano accompaniments at silent movies and playing for weekend dances at Indiana University fraternity and sorority dances.

It wasn’t until Lida came home one rainy day to find 7-year-old Hoagland teaching himself the tune “Hail to Old I.U.” heard on the university’s chimes that she began to teach him basic piano.

“I had been exposed to the piano all my life, but no one ever told me to try it, to touch its keys. Yes, I had discovered a whole new world, and found a new true love,” said Carmichael, in Sudhalther’s excellent biography “Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael.” 

Hoagy Carmichael was a perennial force in Hollywood from the late 1920s until the mid-1950s, a long time for a show-business career. Public Domain

Learning the Blues and Paying His Dues

Carmichael drew inspiration from black musicians of the day, including Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. When the Carmichaels lived in Indianapolis as his father chased jobs, Hoagy would sneak out to the city’s nightspots like Indiana Avenue’s Madam C.J. Walker Theater to hear touring black musicians.

As an adult, Carmichael considered Louis Armstrong a close friend. Armstrong premiered many of Carmichael’s songs in concerts and records. Some of those recordings helped his songs gain national recognition as early as 1933.

Other than his mother’s basic piano instruction, the only other tutoring Carmichael received was from Reginald Alfred DuValle, an Indianapolis band leader and pianist. DuValle taught the skinny boy, a boy who enjoyed what in the 1920s was term “hot music”—the art of improvisation.

“Never play anything that ain’t right,” DuValle advised him. “You may not make any money, but you’ll never get mad at yourself,” Carmichael is quoted as saying in his second memoir, “Sometimes I Wonder” (1965). The future prolific songwriter took that advice to heart. It explains why he took weeks or even months to polish a song. Curiously, Carmichael believed that song melodies were never written, but discovered or uncovered:

“You don’t write melodies, you find them. They lie there on the keys waiting for you to find them. They have always been there. If you find the beginning of a good song, and if your fingers do not stray, the melody should come out of hiding in a short time.”

Carmichael’s Musical Versatility

College campuses in the Roaring Twenties were ground zero for hot music and piano ragtime. By the time Carmichael enrolled at Indiana University in 1920, his passion for music was insatiable. If the music was exciting and had a beat, he was a fan, a student, and soon an imitator thanks to his extraordinary gift of playing by ear.

Carmichael composed his first song, a Dixieland number named “Riverboat Shuffle,” while a student at Indiana University. Originally called “Free Wheeling,” it was renamed in 1924 when recorded at a small recording studio in Richmond, Indiana for Gennett, a fledgling record label.

A sprightly, upbeat number, it was performed by the Wolverine Orchestra, led by legendary cornetist and Carmichael’s close personal friend, Bix Beiderbecke. Beiderbecke and William Moenkhaus, a European-trained classical pianist and composer who also enjoyed 1920s music, were huge influences on Carmichael.

Beiderbecke helped influence Carmichael’s jazz roots while Moenkhaus introduced him to European classical music. Whereas Beiderbecke played by intuition, Moenkhaus played by intellect and training. Together, their influence shaped Carmichael’s music throughout his career. Their untimely deaths so close together at age 28 also inspired his creativity as a composer of popular music.

It was Carmichael’s flexibility and adaptability to meet changing public tastes that helped his career flourish throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and the first half of the 1950s.  He wrote an estimated 650 songs over four decades. They spanned a range of musical genres, from ragtime and jazz to blues, pop music, and songs for movies such as “Ole Buttermilk Sky” (“Canyon Passage,” 1946) and “In The Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” (“Here Comes the Groom,” 1951). The latter earned Carmichael an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.

Of all the memorable melodies Carmichael wrote over the years, none is more synonymous with his name than “Stardust.”

The cover of sheet music for "Star Dust," a song written by Hoagy Carmichael. Public Domain

A Song for the Ages

Carmichael’s signature song has been recorded over 1,500 times and its melody and lyrics are as poignant today as they were nearly a century ago. The tune was written and recorded on Oct. 31, 1927, as a medium tempo jazz instrumental titled “Star Dust.” Two years later that lyrics were added by Mitchell Parrish, a lyricist for New York music publisher Mills Music. The lyrics made the tune unique—now it was a song about a song. It was recorded as an upbeat piano solo and renamed “Stardust.”

In 1930, the popular Isham Jones’s dance band recorded “Stardust” as an instrumental ballad, making the song a national hit on radio. In 1931, trumpeter Louis Armstrong and trombonist Jack Teagarden helped the tune gain additional popularity. That same year, crooner Bing Crosby recorded the first vocal version of the song that had a verse and chorus. By the mid-1930s and 1940s, several popular big bands recorded different arrangements of “Stardust.” Artie Shaw’s band added strings to the composition and sold an estimated 16 million copies.

“Stardust’s” timeless melody has even resonated on the silver screen with appearances in “My Favorite Year” (1982), “Goodfellas” (1990), “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), and “Casino” (1995). In 1995, “Stardust” was welcomed into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

The slightly built songwriter with the “flatsy through the nose” voice, as he described himself, also appeared in 11 Hollywood movies as a piano player with stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews and Kirk Douglas, and one TV movie and two TV shows to boot. His movie roles were generally what he did best in real life: intoxicate listeners with unforgettable melodies that exude nostalgia, and yearning for simpler times.

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