was bigger than me. Maybe I hadn't written it at all. The recollection
of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains
back at it, 'Maybe I didn't write you, but I found you."
-- Hoagy Carmichael, on writing "Stardust"
Great American singer-songwriter
Hoagy Carmichael (1899-1981):
The Song, Not The Singer
by Jamie Jobb
Lida Mary Carmichael, a professional pianist who played for silent films and local dances in Bloomington Indiana, was pregnant in 1899 when a circus came to town and one of its performing families, the Hoaglands, stayed in the Carmichael home. Generosity like that toward performing strangers was a common small-town gesture at the time, and the circus troupe certainly must have made a strong impression on their hosts, who named their new baby: “Howard Hoagland Carmichael”.
So what would you do if you were named after a traveling circus troupe? Shorten your handle to “Hoagy”! Lucky for you, nobody else had that name. A hundred years later, Google would verify he’s the original “Hoagy”!
His mom must have known her son was a prodigy -- by age six, young Hoagy was singing and playing piano himself. He grew up to become America’s premiere tunesmith of the first half of the Twentieth Century. Knowledge of that fact prompted lots of American mothers to enroll their kids in piano lessons after World War II. My mom loved Hoagy, so she wanted me to sing and “tickle those ivories” just like him.
I told her: “Mom, I can’t sing!”
“So what?” she said. “You can still play piano!”
She enrolled me in piano lessons and I went once a week for almost a year. I also practiced a lot, but didn’t like it much. We lived on a river with lots of adventure for kids waiting outside all the time. Even a town as small as ours (2,500 population) had a piano teacher as well as a music teacher at school. My fingers were too small and I couldn’t stretch them around all the chords I was supposed to play.
When it finally came time for our big recital at the First Presbyterian Church, I botched “The Irish Washerwoman” so badly that Mom finally gave up her hopes on my brilliant musical career. My humiliation could have been worse, but I didn’t have to sing! We moved out of town shortly thereafter that sad performance and I never took another piano lesson. I was sure I wasn’t the only river kid in that leaky boat.
Later in life I learned that musicians playing in performance forget their mistakes as they happen and keep right on playing … no pauses, no hesitation. The best performers -- actors included -- get this instinctively. Keep moving, like riding a bike or running a race … Keep going! I don’t have those instincts, but I can recognize them on stage.
* * *
In the late 1970s when I lived in a big house in Marin County, a friend asked if I’d store his piano for a year while he traveled abroad. His was an odd, out-of-tune upright with broken keys and frequency numbers for many notes written right on the keyboard. The friend was an electronic musician who saw the keys as sound waves. I was finishing a book manuscript at the time and used his piano as a way to remove myself from the daily deadline demands of my typewriter.
As I sat there at that borrowed broken keyboard, I found myself -- an adult with fully formed hands -- now able to hit chords and make a little “music” myself, despite the poor tuning of that upright. So for a whole year I would fiddle there alone for an hour or so. And I found myself naturally playing chord progressions that turned out to be what were known as “The Standards”. It was then that I finally began to appreciate my Mom’s music.
Like most folks of her generation, Mom loved big bands. But like me, she couldn’t hold a tune. Hoagy was hardly an accomplished vocalist himself, but he grew up to become America’s most inventive and adventurous songwriter, who was also a premiere bandleader, composer, pianist, actor and singer.
My Mom loved Hoagy Carmichael songs and the fact that she couldn’t sing them any better than he did made it all OK. You may note that there’s an ease to his singing, like Buddy Ebsen’s ease of dancing. It kinda just happened.
Our house often was filled suddenly with Mom belting out Hoagy’s strange unrhymed lines, his words drifting up from the kitchen to my room … it’s not hard to imagine Hoagy’s early exposure to music may hold the key to his goofy teasing lyrics:
“I long for that moon country / That possum and coon country / That sycamore heaven back south / I’ll lose my mind till I get there” ...
OR “Well, here we are / Just about the same / Foggy little fella / Drowsy little dame / Two sleepy people by dawn's early light / And too much in love to say goodnight” ..
AND “You kissed my lips, tell me / What kind o' man is you / And I'm yours still, against my will / What kind o' man is you”?
As a teenager with goofy good looks in Indianapolis, Hoagy took piano lessons from a local barber named Reginald DuValle who played a rollicking ragtime. Those lessons established Hoagy’s early keyboard chops. Then he formed a jazz band in college where he meet someone who’d become a lifelong friend -- Bix Beiderbecke. Bix led Hoagy to Louis Armstrong, The Dorsey brothers, Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Johnny Mercer … all big band greats. Hoagy named his son “Bix”.
Evidence of Hoagy’s pervasive songwriting influence surfaced big time ten years ago with the release of “Hoagy Carmichael: First of the Singer-Songwriters” -- a four-CD boxed set of 101 tunes, including many of the same songs redone by several bands, so we get a direct cross-reference to the tune done in different styles to indicate just how widespread was Carmichael’s influence. The box includes nine different versions of “Stardust”, five each for “Lazy River”, “Washboard Blues” and “March of the Hoodlums”.
The legacy project contains tunes rendered by not only Hoagy’s bands but also by folks like Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Mildred Bailey, the Dorseys, Paul Whiteman, Fletcher Henderson, Ed Lang, Irving Mills, Red Nichols, Jack Benny and Connee Boswell (solo and with her sisters).
This is quite a gold mine for musicians and the musically inclined -- a great gift for a prodigy. Learn more about it here:
Carmichael continued composing into the 1960s but he tended toward new complex compositions rather than his popular simple songs like the ones which made him famous in the CD set. After he introduced a pair of full orchestral works which met with tepid receptions, he stopped writing music and retired to Rancho Mirage where he passed away in 1981.
Take a couple minutes to listen to Hoagy on the You Tube bot that trolls the internet for his music; these clips contain no video but you can listen all day: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtNHE-lgHjpAkJ6rNeyyTNg
Mom loved all the big bands particularly if Hoagy sang or played with them. She was born into that radio generation which held deep appreciation for the soaring sonics of her time, and now her favorite piano man has become mine too! The man with the circus name who knew he wrote melodies bigger than himself.
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