Bolting from his desk, the clerk—Hoagland Howard Carmichael,
better known to his friends as Hoagy—ran to the store and bought the album,
which had been recorded by cornetist Red Nichols’s band. Returning to his
office, Carmichael sat down and wrote a letter to a friend in Indiana informing
him of his decision to quit the law profession because “times are too bad to
have a young kid like me playing hoppity-hop on the glass-topped desks for 50
[dollars] a month.” Apologizing to a friend in the law office about his abrupt
departure, Carmichael, who recalled the occasion in his autobiography Sometimes I Wonder, received the
following response: “Hoagy, you never had a chance, you music struck bastard.”
Generations of fans remain glad that the Bloomington-born
Carmichael decided to forgo a law career and instead turn to his ongoing love
affair with the piano, becoming, as music historian John Edward Hasse noted, an
accomplished artist whose “small canvas was the three-minute song.” In his
career, Carmichael fashioned a string of enduring songs and instrumentals that
led to his rise as one of America’s foremost songwriters with such noteworthy
compositions as “Georgia on My Mind,” “Lazy River,” “The Nearness of You,”
“Rockin’ Chair,” “Skylark,” and his best-known piece, “Stardust.”
Born in a four-room cottage on Grant Street in Bloomington
on November 22, 1899, Carmichael was the eldest child raised by Howard Clyde
and Lida Mary Carmichael. Reflecting on his boyhood, Hoagy said he never really
had the chance to know his father, who eked out a precarious living first as a
horse-and-buggy operator and later as an electrician. “His wild, shouting
personality overwhelmed me,” Carmichael admitted.
The family’s one treasure was a piano, and Lida helped make
ends meet by playing at the local movie theater and at dances held on the
campus of the nearby Indiana University. “I can still remember,” said
Carmichael, “walking with bare dusty feet into the cold parlor and standing
beside the upright golden oak piano on which Mother practiced her movie music.
How I used to love hearing her play!”
As the Carmichael family shuffled between homes in
Bloomington and Indianapolis, Hoagy gradually taught himself to play piano,
which he came to adore. He noted that although he might often have to be
scolded by his mother to take a bath, he always had clean hands when he sat
down at the keyboard. “You don’t paw your love with dirty fingernails,”
Carmichael said.
Along with the piano, one of the few bright spots during
Hoagy’s young life came in 1916 when the budding musician met a black pianist
named Reginald DuValle. “The things he could do with a piano were a standard by
which I judged all piano work, including a lot of fancy masters,” Carmichael
said of DuValle. In addition to helping him with his playing, the long-fingered
DuValle also offered some advice that Carmichael never forgot: “Never play
anything that ain’t right. You may
not make any money, but you’ll never get mad at yourself.”
Returning to Bloomington in 1919, Carmichael finished high
school and eventually entered IU to study law. Actually, he pointed out in his
autobiography, he led two lives while at the university, “a surface existence
at college classes, and an almost underground one as a jazz revolutionary.” He
formed his own jazz band, Carmichael’s Collegians, and became friends with Leon“Bix” Beiderbecke, a cornet player who had his own jazz group known as The
Wolverine Orchestra.
Describing Beiderbecke’s musical ability, Carmichael noted
that the notes his friend produced on his horn “weren’t blown—they were hit,
like a mallet hits a chime, and his tone had a richness that can only come from
the heart.” After hearing that sound, Carmichael rose abruptly from his piano
bench and fell, limp, onto a couch. “He had completely ruined me,” Carmichael
said of Beiderbecke, who died in 1931. “That sounds idiotic, but it is the
truth.”
Beiderbecke returned Carmichael’s friendship, encouraging
him to write songs and arranging for the Wolverine Orchestra to record his
“Riverboat Shuffle” for Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana, in 1924. Other
songs flowed from Carmichael’s talented fingers during the 1920s, including the
one that became his standard, “Stardust,” one of the most recorded songs in
history.
After abandoning his Florida law career, Carmichael pursued
his songwriting profession in New York and worked with such leading lyricists
as Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, Paul Francis Webster, and Stanley Adams.
Although most of Carmichael’s compositions were made famous by others singers,
his interpretations were popular with fans. He described his singing talent as
follows: “My native wood-note and often off-key voice is what I call ‘flatsy
through the nose.’”
In 1936 Carmichael moved to Los Angeles (where, he noted,
“the rainbow never hits the ground for composers”) to write songs for movies.
Eventually, he branched out into other entertainment venues, acting in movies,
hosting a musical variety show on network radio, appearing on television, and
producing oil paintings.
Called by critic Alec Wilder “the most talented, inventive,
sophisticated, and jazz-oriented of all the great craftsmen,” Carmichael
received an honorary doctorate from IU in 1972. His son, Hoagy Bix, noted that his
father tried to put his fame in perspective and “never lost sight of those
early years in Indiana, and the thin kid who spent countless hours learning the
piano in the basement of the old house in Bloomington.” After suffering a heart
attack, Carmichael died in Rancho Mirage, California, on December 27, 1981.
