Hoagland Howard Carmichael (November 22, 1899 – December 27, 1981) was an American musician, composer, songwriter, actor, author and lawyer. Carmichael was one of the most successful Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the 1930s and 1940s, and was among the first singer-songwriters in the age of mass media to use new communication technologies such as radio broadcasts, television, microphones, and sound recordings (musical records).
Carmichael composed several hundred songs, including 50 that achieved hit record status. He is best known for composing four of the most-recorded American songs of all time: "Stardust" (1927), with lyrics by Mitchell Parish, "Georgia on My Mind" (1930), with lyrics by Stuart Gorrell, "The Nearness of You" (1937), with lyrics by Ned Washington, and "Heart and Soul" (1938), with lyrics by Frank Loesser.
He also collaborated with lyricist-songwriter Johnny Mercer (1909–1976), on "Lazybones" (1933), and later "Skylark" (1941). Carmichael's "Ole Buttermilk Sky" of 1946, was an Academy Award nominee for an Oscar in the following year of March 1947, with the eponymous theme song from the Western film Canyon Passage (1946), starring Dana Andrews, Brian Donlevy, Susan Hayward and Ward Bond, in which he co-starred as a ukulele and guitar-playing balladeer musician and prospector-miner riding a mule.
Four years later, "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening", with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1951. Carmichael also appeared as a character actor and musical performer in 14 other films, hosted three musical-variety radio programs, performed on television, and wrote two autobiographies or memoirs.
Hoagland Howard ("Hoagy") Carmichael was born on November 22, 1899, in Bloomington, Indiana. He was the first child and only son of Howard Clyde and Lida Mary (Robison) Carmichael. His parents named him after a circus troupe called the "Hoaglands," who had stayed at the Carmichael house during his mother's pregnancy. Howard worked as a horse-drawn taxi driver and later as an electrician, while Lida, a versatile pianist, provided musical accompaniment at nickelodeons and silent movie theaters, and private parties to supplement the family's income. Hoagy had two younger sisters, Georgia and Joanne.
Due to Howard's unstable job history, the family moved frequently. Hoagy spent most of his early years in Bloomington, which served as the county seat of Monroe County and was also a college town, home to the main campus of Indiana University, as well as being near the state capital, Indianapolis. In 1910, when Hoagy was about 11 years old, the family relocated to Missoula, Montana.
Carmichael's mother taught him to sing and play the piano at an early age. Aside from a few piano lessons with Reginald DuValle—an Indianapolis bandleader and accordionist known as "the elder statesman of Indiana jazz"—Carmichael received no formal musical training. He was largely self-taught as a pianist and entirely self-taught as a composer. The Carmichael family returned to Indianapolis in 1916, where Hoagy attended Emmerich Manual High School; however, at the age of 16, he dropped out to help support the family. Three years later, in 1919, Hoagy and his family moved back to Bloomington, where he graduated from Bloomington High School.
For musical inspiration, Carmichael listened to prominent ragtime pianists Hank Wells and Hube Hanna. At 18, to help support his family's meager income, he held various manual jobs in building construction, a bicycle chain factory, and a slaughterhouse. This difficult period was somewhat alleviated by playing piano duets with his mother and through his long friendship with DuValle, who introduced him to piano-jazz improvisation. Carmichael's professional music career began in 1918 when he earned $5 playing at a college fraternity dance at Indiana University.
The death of Carmichael's three-year-old sister in 1918, likely due to the Spanish flu pandemic, deeply affected him. He later reflected, "My sister Joanne—the victim of poverty. We couldn't afford a good doctor or good attention, and that's when I vowed I would never be broke again in my lifetime."
After graduating from high school, Carmichael attended Indiana University in Bloomington, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1925. He was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity and played piano around Indiana and Ohio with his band, "Carmichael's Collegians."
Around 1922, Carmichael met Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke, a cornetist and occasional pianist from Iowa. They became friends and played music together. In 1923, during a visit to Chicago, Beiderbecke introduced Carmichael to fellow musician Louis Armstrong, with whom Carmichael would later collaborate. Armstrong was playing in King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band at the time. Armstrong continued to influence Carmichael's compositions; he mentioned in a letter to his wife in the early 1930s that he planned to meet Armstrong to learn about "purty notes." Under Beiderbecke's influence, Carmichael attempted to play the cornet but found his lips unsuited to the mouthpiece and soon stopped. He was also inspired by Beiderbecke's impressionistic and classical music ideas.
Carmichael's first recorded song, initially titled "Free Wheeling," was written for Beiderbecke. The song was later recorded as "Riverboat Shuffle" by Beiderbecke's band, The Wolverines, in 1924 for Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana, and it became a jazz staple (lyrics by Mitchell Parish were added in 1939). Other early musical compositions by Carmichael included "Washboard Blues" and "Boneyard Shuffle," which were recorded by Curtis Hitch and his band, "Hitch's Happy Harmonists," at Gennett Records. The band's instrumental rendition of "Washboard Blues," recorded on May 19, 1925, was the first recording in which Carmichael performed his own compositions, including an improvised piano solo.
After graduating from IU's law school in 1926, Carmichael moved to Florida, where he worked as a legal clerk in a West Palm Beach law firm. However, after failing the Florida bar exam, he returned to Indiana in 1927. He joined an Indianapolis law firm, Bingham, Mendenhall and Bingham, and passed the Indiana bar exam but ultimately devoted most of his energies to music. Carmichael described his songwriting method as, "You don't write melodies, you find them…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 composed several hundred songs, including fifty that achieved hit-record status during his long career. In his early days as a songwriter in Indiana (1924–1929), he wrote and performed in the Hot Jazz improvisational style, popular with jazz dance bands. While he was living in New York City (1929–1936), he wrote songs that were intended to stand alone, independent of any other production, such as a theatrical performance or a motion picture. Carmichael's songs from this period continued to include jazz influences. During his later years in California (1936–1981), his songs were predominantly instrumentals. Nearly four dozen were written expressly for, or were incorporated into, motion pictures.
Carmichael made hundreds of recordings between 1925 and his death in 1981. He also appeared on radio and television and in motion pictures and live performances, where he demonstrated his versatility. Because Carmichael lacked the vocal strength to sing without amplification on stage, as well as the unusual tone of his voice, which he described as "flatsy through the nose," he took advantage of new electrical technologies, especially the microphone, sound amplification, and advances in recording. As a singer-pianist, Carmichael was adept at selling his songs to lyricists, music publishers, film producers, and promoting them to the public via microphones on stage and in mass media.
On October 31, 1927, Carmichael recorded "Star Dust," one of his most famous songs, at the Gennett Records studio in Richmond, Indiana, playing the piano solo himself. Carmichael recruited Frank Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke, along with members of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra that included the Dorsey brothers, to play at the late October recording session with him; it is not known which of the orchestra's musicians were at the October 31 session when "Star Dust" was initially recorded. New York's Mills Music published the song as an upbeat piano solo in January 1929 and renamed it "Stardust." (Mills Music republished the song with the addition of Mitchell Parish's lyrics in May 1929.) "Stardust" attracted little attention until 1930, when Isham Jones and his orchestra recorded it as a sentimental ballad with a slower tempo, the re-timing often credited to the band's arranger, Victor Young. It became a hit song, the first of many for Carmichael. Its idiosyncratic melody in medium tempo–a song about a song–later became a standard of the Great American Songbook, recorded by hundreds of artists, including Artie Shaw, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson, and Wynton Marsalis.