The New York Review of Books
September 26, 2002
1.
It seems that out in California, one memorable day in 1946, a transplanted Indiana boy and devoted golfer, Hoagy Carmichael, hit a hole in one at the Bel Air Golf Club. According to one version of the story, he turned to his companions and said, "Wait, let me hit another. I think I've got it."
According to another version, current on the Internet, the year was not 1946 but 1956. According to still another, his companion was a golf instructor, who began by solemnly advising him how to hold the club, how to stand, how to follow through. On the first hole, Hoagy hit his miraculous ball and remarked offhandedly, "Okay, I think I've got the idea now."
Details of the day scarcely matter. But the vagaries and inconsistencies of the tale are revealingly typical of somebody who, as his two volumes of autobiography attest, rarely allowed the facts to impede the flow of a good story. The Stardust Road (1946) and Sometimes I Wonder (1965) abound in distant conversations no one could possibly recall verbatim, and the books feel like the work of an anecdotalist intent on tidying up the illogic, harshness, and stammering clumsiness of lived life. What can be certain about Hoagy Carmichael is that he had hit a hole in one long before his memorable day out in California. Prowess, doggedness, and a fluky stroke of good luck similarly united for Hoagy back in 1926, in Indiana, on another playing field entirely. That was the year he discovered the melody for "Stardust," which would later be outfitted with lyrics by Mitchell Parish—a hole in one of a song if ever there was one.
Of course Carmichael wrote a number of other durable melodies, including "Skylark," "The Nearness of You," "Rockin' Chair," "I Get Along Without You Very Well," and "Lazy River." One of them, "Georgia on My Mind," eventually became, through its celebrated Ray Charles recording, a sort of unofficial Southern anthem before becoming an official one: in 1979, the Georgia legislature adopted it as the state song. (Carmichael had never set foot in Georgia when the song was composed.) And whenever children cluster around a piano, dependably a pair of them will break into a duet of "Heart and Soul"—a melody so entrenched and archetypical that it's hard to believe any modern songwriter conceived it. (When I mentioned to my wife that "Heart and Soul" was a Carmichael song, she protested, "Surely it dates back to the Romans!")
Although Carmichael sometimes grumbled about being perceived as a one-hit composer, he generally encouraged any billing of himself as "the 'Stardust' man." And no wonder. Some three quarters of a century after its creation, "Stardust" remains one of perhaps a half-dozen American popular songs that have legitimate claims to being called The Most Popular Song Ever. Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" may have sold more copies, and his bright "God Bless America," especially in the dark days since 9/11, may have a bigger place in the national imagination. Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg's "Over the Rainbow," drummed into young minds everywhere through videos of The Wizard of Oz, has certainly achieved among later generations a greater and an earlier degree of recognition. Yet in some unscientific calculus of "Stardust" that encompasses the number of different recordings made (it has been called the "most recorded song ever written"), radio time over the years, even the frequency with which its melody pops up in hotel cocktail lounges and as grocery store Muzak-to-buy-hamburger-by, it occupies a solitary pinnacle.
Carmichael's Indiana roots ran deep. He was born there, in Bloomington, in 1899, and after his death, in 1981, he was buried there. Although his often-upended childhood included a stint in Montana (his father, a small-town and small-time entrepreneur, was forever changing jobs), the imaginative draw of Indiana remained potent. There was a period, in the Twenties, when Carmichael moved to Manhattan and underwent a shift in allegiance (New York City, he wrote, "is actually the hub of the world, and strangely enough it has a far greater hold on me than the whole state of Indiana"). Later, he settled permanently in California, where he savored a sense of being well-connected: "By 1950 there wasn't a movie star, producer, director, or columnist in town that we didn't know personally." California brought him fame from an unexpected quarter: movies and television. Through his friend the director Howard Hawks, he landed a role as Cricket, the piano-playing bar musician in To Have and Have Not, alongside Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. He had sizable parts as well in The Best Years of Our Lives and Young Man with a Horn; hosted his own television variety show in the Fifties; even took a one-year role in a television western, Laramie. Yet what is most striking about his two chatty volumes of autobiography is the degree to which, in both actual pages devoted and heightened emotional investment, they are planted in the Midwest.
Carmichael's musical training was desultory, leaving him with a lifelong sense of inferiority toward those who hadn't, as he had, picked up their education by scrappy serendipity. His mother, Lida Carmichael, though likewise untrained, found occasional employment as a pianist at a local movie house, providing musical accompaniment to the silent films flickering overhead. She was fond of ragtime. While in high school, Hoagy befriended Reginald Alfred DuValle, an older black pianist who has been called "the elder statesman of Indiana jazz." According to DuValle's son, "In our neighborhood we seldom had any white people. So he kind of stood out, if you know what I mean." By the time he went off to university, at Bloomington, Carmichael was a self-described fanatic for "hot" music: "Everything had to be hot in those days." Although Indiana University was selected for reasons of convenience and economy, it provided an ideal hatchery for a jazz fledgling who got his "kicks" from "the scrape of couples on a dance floor, the sound of music late at night across water reflecting a moon low enough to bite."
Indiana has long promoted itself as the "crossroads of the nation," a phrase that today carries a whiff of the outmoded when so much of the nation's transportation—of goods, people, ideas —takes place on the airways rather than the roadways. Things were different in the Twenties, when Hoagy's musical career solidified. He could plausibly feel that Bloomington was at the hub of everything that interested him: "Jazz maniacs were being born and I was one of them. There were legions of us from New Orleans to Chicago and Bloomington was right in the middle of everything." New sounds were being shipped up and down the Mississippi by riverboat, lugged up and down the nation's heartland by rail. Notable jazz musicians continually disembarked in Bloomington, some for extended sojourns.
One such pilgrim was the soon-to-be-legendary trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke, fresh from Davenport, Iowa. Bix and Hoagy forged a sturdy bond born of shared high purpose: they were working hard—singly, together —to fill the air with "clean wonderful banners of melody." Beiderbecke's self-ravaging genius (he was dead, of alcohol-related causes, by the age of twenty-eight) haunted Carmichael to the end of his days.
The rich musical environment of Bloomington in the Twenties comes vividly to life in Richard M. Sudhalter's new book, Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael. As a guide to the era and the environment, Sudhalter can have few if any equals. He's the author of a biography of Beiderbecke and the highly regarded Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz, 1915–1945. He's also a skilled jazz trumpeter, an enlightening musical analyst, a dogged researcher.
And—an unexpected bonus—Sudhalter writes stylishly. Recent years have brought a spate of books about the American pop song and its songwriters—most of them lovingly but cumbersomely written. A happy exception, Sudhalter chooses his words with a musician's ear for nuance and rhythm.
The book proves somewhat less satisfying as psychological portraiture. Readers are likely to find themselves curiously unmoved in the final pages, as Carmichael, suffering from cancer, eye problems, and depression, drifts toward cardiac failure. At the end of the day, perhaps Carmichael is simply not a wholly appealing figure. (His two volumes of autobiography, for all their affability, share a narrowness of outlook.) In a world of free-living bohemian musicians, he remained fastidious ("I cut my own hair a lot—I disliked the germ cultures most barbershops were; I cut my own hair to this day"), conservative (he was a lifelong Republican), and unforthcoming.
A reader is nearly halfway through Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael before any but the most glancing references to Hoagy's romantic life appear. The psychological ups and downs of somebody who began as a young man "not very successful with girls," with an "inferiority complex as long as a tape worm," and who eventually wound up having an affair with one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, Jean Simmons, are largely absent. Nor do either of Carmichael's two marriages—particularly the second of them—emerge with much specificity.
It may well be that Sudhalter, who befriended Carmichael late in his life, and who had the extensive cooperation of Carmichael's two sons, felt constraints of tact and loyalty. Although Carmichael's tendency in his books, as in his life, was to slough off disappointment and disaster, there was a high fatality/disaster rate among his intimates. His father's endless flounderings were clearly heart-rending. Beiderbecke's alcoholism, pursued with suicidal intensity, was nothing short of tragic. Carmichael's sister Martha died at the age of forty-six, apparently of a drug overdose. And after their divorce, Hoagy's first wife, Ruth, subsided into an addiction to various prescription drugs and ended up over- dosing on sleeping pills, evidently another suicide.
Carmichael lingers in the public imagination chiefly through his film roles: he's that genial long-faced little man at the saloon piano who hasn't removed his hat. He's smoking a cigarette and, in his quiet way, plainly enjoying himself. But if the camera were to pull back on this particular stage set, it would reveal various bodies in the wings.
Sudhalter's reticence may also reflect a realization, discreetly underplayed, that Hoagy Carmichael could be an impossible man. Sudhalter surely could have compiled a string of damning anecdotes, had he wanted to. Carmichael was mortifyingly tightfisted at times, and the persona he adopted of the folksy, aphoristic bystander only partially concealed his aggression and inability to compromise. He often had trouble getting along with people.
This was a failing with professional as well as personal consequences. Of all the classic songwriters, Carmichael may be the least affiliated with any lyricist. He's probably best known for the songs he wrote with Mitchell Parish ("Stardust," "One Morning in May") and Johnny Mercer ("Skylark," "How Little We Know," "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening," "Lazy Bones"), but lyrics were also supplied by Frank Loesser ("Heart and Soul," "Two Sleepy People"), Stu Gorrell ("Georgia on My Mind"), Robert De Leon ("Can't Get Indiana Off My Mind"), and a host of others. At one point in Hollywood, despite having already composed some colossal hits, Carmichael was "writing with whatever lyricist the studio assigned him." Typically, successful songwriting teams describe their collaboration as a marriage of sorts; according to this formulation, Carmichael preferred to remain a bachelor, playing the field.
His string of collaborators partly explains why any album of Carmichael songs, whether sung by the composer or by others, usually feels less of a piece than an album of, say, Rodgers and Hart or George and Ira Gersh-win. Although there are many great Hoagy Carmichael songs, there isn't a prototypical Hoagy Carmichael Song. What's most remarkable among my own favorites—"Skylark," "Stardust," "I Get Along Without You Very Well," "Heart and Soul," "Two Sleepy People," "Rockin' Chair," "The Nearness of You," "Georgia on My Mind" —is how different they are one from another.
Certain songwriters have a knack for creating music that is virtually performer-proof; no matter what's done to them, some inextinguishable charm persists. The Gershwin brothers created songs that have been subjected over the years to treatments no well-intentioned song should have to endure—they've been shouted and whispered, countrified and rockified, accelerated as if the musicians were hyperventilating, slowed until the beat suggests the pulse of a man in a coma —and still, amazingly, some pleasure gets conveyed.
Carmichael's songs are less hardy. Often conditions must be just right before they come into their own. (It's a great irony that "Stardust" has been so frequently recorded, since it's extremely difficult to bring off. Some wonderful singers—including Mel Torme and even Frank Sinatra—have released versions that are no joy to listen to.) Two of Carmichael's finest songs, "Skylark" and "I Get Along Without You Very Well," are particularly delicate creatures.
I'd always thought "Skylark" quite appealing, but it wasn't until I heard Helen Forrest singing it, in a 1942 recording with Harry James and his Orchestra, that it became for me something far more: one of the greatest popular songs anybody ever wrote. With her modest delivery, a voice coaxing and plaintive, Forrest is a Little Girl Lost who always finds herself coming down on exactly the right note—no easy thing with a song of such unexpected chromatic turns. On paper, the Johnny Mercer lyric looks unpromising—antiquated and clunky:
Skylark,
Have you seen a valley green with Spring
Where my heart can go a-journeying,
Over the shadows and the rain
To a blossom-covered lane?
But in Helen Forrest's performance, "Skylark" turns out to be a perfect blend of pokiness and urgency, folksiness and ethereality—and all so convincing that it isn't until the song is finished that you step back and say, "Good Lord, she's singing to a bird!"
Although Chet Baker has a winning recording of "I Get Along Without You Very Well," the song may ultimately belong to Billie Holiday. It appears on what was nearly her last album, Lady in Satin, recorded in 1958. Battered by drug abuse, arrests, romantic scrapes, unending harassment by the authorities, Holiday had almost no voice left by the late Fifties; her range, never large, had dwindled, and the insouciant assurance of her earlier recordings was quickly lapsing into a croak and a rasp.
Lady in Satin is one of those albums that divide the world. Among critics, some of her biggest fans have declared it her worst album. Others (I'm among them) find it her most affecting—the album in which she proved that, even without a voice, she could out-sing anybody. In any case, nobody would disagree that the album makes harrowing listening, and "I Get Along Without You Very Well" could serve as its theme song. The lyric (which sometimes gets credited to Carmichael, though actually it was his revision of an anonymous poem found in a magazine) can easily sound smugly stoical:
I get along without you very well,
Of course I do,
Except when soft rains fall
And drip from leaves,
Then I recall
The thrill of being sheltered in your arms,
Of course I do.
Some performers melodramatically play up the pain beneath the bravado. Holiday doesn't need to. The pain is there, excruciating and unignorable. Some of Holiday's contemporaries— Ella Fitzgerald, Jo Stafford—could sing like angels. But Holiday sang better than an angel: hers is the voice of a brokenhearted and unbreakably spirited woman.
Some of the great songwriters, like Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, could indulge their thorniness when they wished, since they didn't need anybody else in order to get the basic job done: they could write melodies and lyrics both. Others who were not lyricists, like Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern, were compelled to recognize the virtue of accommodation. Carmichael occupied a peculiar middle ground. A perfectly adequate lyricist, he was responsible for the words to some of his best-known songs: "Hong Kong Blues," "Rockin' Chair," "Bread and Gravy." (He was in fact more of a lyricist than is commonly known. According to Sudhalter, handwritten manuscripts in the Carmichael archives show him regularly reshaping songs for which he received no lyricist's co-credit.) Yet he could hardly muster a verbal panache and diversity of subject commensurate with the range of his musical talent. In short, Carmichael needed and didn't need other people.
His career as a performer was likewise a blend of autonomy and limitation. Sudhalter is helpful in placing Carmichael's career in perspective:
Singer-songwriters have become so central in current pop music that it's difficult to imagine a time when this was not the case. In the music world of 1933, songwriters wrote songs, instrumentalists played them, and singers sang them. The idea of three in one, a triple-threat performer who blended them all, was new, and still rare.
As if in response to stereotypes about Midwestern hog-callers, Carmichael's singing voice was casual, slippery, and engaging, placing him vocally in a varied and honorable line of subdued Midwestern breathiness, which includes Garrison Keillor, John Malkovich, and Tom Daschle. But while Carmichael's voice might have been suited for rendering the poignant nostalgia of "Stardust" or the avuncular upbraiding of "Small Fry," it wasn't up to more stringent technical demands. To the extent that Carmichael, consciously or unconsciously, wrote for his own voice, he may have restricted his musical imagination.
For anybody who dislikes the usual country-and-western radio-station fare, who instinctively shudders at the prospect of another cowboy-hatted figure playin' us a little song, the career of Hoagy Carmichael presents entrancing alternative possibilities. Carmichael, more than most of the other great American songwriters, has been embraced by country singers, including Willie Nelson. Crystal Gayle devoted an entire album to him, Crystal Gayle Sings the Heart and Soul of Hoagy Carmichael. A number of appealing songs—like "Ole Buttermilk Sky," written for the film Canyon Passage—were composed with western themes in mind.
Carmichael's subject matter was individual and peculiar. He's commonly perceived as that anomaly among songwriters—the hit maker who didn't write about love. For the most part, that's a fair characterization. Notwithstanding "The Nearness of You" and "I Get Along Without You Very Well," he mostly sidestepped the sticky embrace of romance. Far more than most of his contemporaries, he wrote about place, often rural places. His titles are a catalog of place names, fondly and (given his nostalgia for a South he hardly knew) fancifully evoked: "Memphis in June," "Georgia on My Mind," "Moon Country," "Lazy River," "Can't Get Indiana Off My Mind," "New Orleans." There are also cameo portraits of people whom most songwriters instinctively overlook, like children ("Small Fry") and the elderly ("Little Old Lady," "Rockin' Chair"). There's even a smattering of flora and fauna ("Blue Orchids," "Baltimore Oriole," "Skylark").
Fields, rivers, plants, animals, and, tucked communally among them, an assortment of everyday people, old and young—Carmichael's music suggests a country music no less popular but far more various and true than what your radio commonly affords. When you do hear one of his songs on the radio, you recognize the difference instantly. They spring from another source. Over the airwaves will come something like Crystal Gayle singing "One Morning in May," or Hoagy himself performing "Ole Buttermilk Sky," broadcast from that distant land called Authenticity.
It's hard to know what to make of Carmichael's avoidance of romance. While it's true that he composed more love songs than is widely known, most went nowhere—a commercial failure suggestive of an underlying artistic ambivalence; perhaps he hesitated to sing about heartbreak because his heart wasn't in it. He seems to have been maladapted—melodically, temperamentally —to the conventional love song in either of its two modes: the elation of love found or the desolation of love lost. (Not for him the "sob ballads" of Irving Berlin.) Carmichael's characteristic moods lay elsewhere: wryness, playfulness, sweetness, and—especially —wistfulness.
Wistfulness lies at the core of "Stardust." As Sudhalter points out, it's a "song about a song about love"—a mellow, melancholy-tinged evocation of distant melodies, caught at one remove:
Sometimes I wonder why I spend the lonely night
Dreaming of a song.
The melody
Haunts my reverie,
And I am once again with you
When our love was new,
And each kiss an inspiration.
But that was long ago:
Now my consolation
Is in the star dust of a song.
Or as Carmichael himself described it: "That one's all the girls, the university, the family, the old golden oak, all the good things gone, all wrapped up in a melody."
Of all the most popular songs of the most popular songwriters, it's hard to think of another so steeped in wistfulness. ("Over the Rainbow" perhaps comes nearest, but it is too full of pressing youthful ardor to qualify; wistfulness has a more seasoned temper.) Oscar Hammerstein approvingly noted that the "Stardust" melody "rambles and roams like an truant schoolboy in a meadow." Or perhaps like the memory of a grown man, wistfully recalling the sweet freedom of a schoolboy's illicit lassitude.
Wistfulness is a dominant tone as well in Carmichael's two volumes of autobiography. On the surface, Carmichael's adult life reflects the competing attractions of New York and Los Angeles. The former boasted the music publishing industry, where his fortune was made, and Broadway, where he always hoped, vainly, to make his fortune and reputation anew. The latter was the site of his film and television career, as well as his entrée into a sunshiny world of parties, golf, and tennis.
The longer you spend with Carmichael's books and music, however, the more those competing attractions actually seem to lie between Indiana and a shifting Elsewhere. Carmichael repeatedly speaks of an air of unreality in the world around him. His success in California? His house in Palm Springs on the edge of a swanky golf course? "When away, I had a feeling that none of it had ever happened on the coast, that the coast itself did not exist, that there was no California." And, "There was no season and no changing to seasons, and even the leaves did not fall. Life left no marks."
Such comments render explicit what is urgently implicit throughout The Stardust Road and Sometimes I Wonder: life was never realer than it was back in the Twenties, in Bloomington, in the Kappa Sigma frat house. These are the passages in his books where his prose is most passionate. In Sometimes I Wonder Carmichael can hardly be bothered to describe what it was like to win an Academy Award in 1951 (for best song—"In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening"), or in 1946 to act in a movie with two of Hollywood's most winsome women, Myrna Loy and Teresa Wright. But he will chronicle in loving detail all the ritualistic, sophomoric high jinks of a bunch of Midwestern frat boys back in the early Twenties.
A few years ago, I visited the Hoagy Carmichael Room at the University of Indiana. Here, lovingly preserved, was a wealth of material from college days: his fraternity paddle, a mock diploma ("Doctor of Discord, with all the rights and privileges thereunto appertaining"), promotional materials ("Carmichael's Collegians"). There were also photographs of a mock graduation, of the band chosen for the junior prom ("The orchestra makes a specialty of Charleston time as well as other types of music with which Hoosiers are familiar"), and of "the traditional burying of the Purdue jinx." The effect, not surprisingly, was of the great improbability of it all—how unlikely that, out of such provincial operations, music destined to go around the world would flourish.
It's a sense of improbability familiar to anyone versed in the great figures of Tin Pan Alley. Who would have supposed that another small-town Indiana boy, Cole Porter, would metamorphose into a Parisian sophisticate, spinning gorgeous melodies out of a palatial house in the Rue Monsieur? Or that a cantor's son from Buffalo, shy Harold Arlen, would marry his musical heritage to the harmonies and rhythms of Harlem? Or that a penniless kid from the Lower East Side, Irving Berlin, who never finished high school, never learned to read music, and never really learned to play the piano, would become the nation's unofficial songwriter laureate?
Carmichael is to be excused for occasionally wondering how genuine were the trappings of his success. Was it all the fantasy of an "Indiana country boy on a lucky spree"? Was he "just one of the passing freaks, like flagpole sitters or channel swimmers?" (How suitable that the word he's most intimately associated with—stardust—is synonymous with the nebulous and insubstantial.)
Carmichael speaks of the existence of two people within him—two Hoagys —and
of his difficulty in believing in both simultaneously. Was he really the "hicky
kid" from the hinterlands or the internationally famous musician out under the
palms of Hollywood? Some twenty years after his death, however, surveying his
books (back in print), his new biography, the burgeoning Web sites, the expanded
materials available at Indiana University, the re-released recordings and the
new interpretations of old songs, we can safely declare both of those figures
as real as they come.
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