Hoagy Carmichael Collection Stirs a Lifetime of ‘Stardust’ Memories

“The Classic Hoagy Carmichael” is an invitation to slip into the purple dusk of twilight time to celebrate the stardust melody in the music of the years gone by.

Hoagland Howard Carmichael (1899-1981) was one of America’s most appealing, and most visible, composers. Though he seldom wrote his own lyrics, Carmichael often recorded his own songs.

His modest but genial voice, heartland good looks and ingratiating personality made him quite the fixture on radio, and in the ‘50s, on TV.

It’s not that much of a stretch to call Carmichael, as co-producer John Edward Hasse does on this new boxed set, the first major singer-songwriter in the age of mass media.

The best of Carmichael’s many hundred songs were those open to interpretation, which may be why “Stardust” (with lyrics by Mitchell Parish) is, at 1,300 versions, one of the most recorded songs of all time.

Not surprisingly, there are six disparate versions of “Stardust” included in “The Classic Hoagy Carmichael,” a delightful and revealing four-record or three-cassette collection produced by the Indiana Historical Society and the Smithsonian Collection of Recordings.

Other Carmichael standards--”Lazy River,” “Rockin’ Chair,” “Georgia on My Mind,” “The Nearness of You” and “Skylark”--all get deserved double coverage. Listening to these 49 songs, one comes to appreciate the sweet sentimentality, small-town values and genuine wholesomeness that imbued Carmichael’s music with its pure American sensibility.

Hasse, curator of U.S. music at the National Museum of American History, notes in an informative 64-page booklet that Carmichael was also a musical innovator, experimenting with unconventional harmony and structure in the popular song form, sometimes producing songs that were easier to play than they were to sing.

Influenced by jazz instrumentalists, and therefore not overly reverent toward melodic rigidity, Carmichael wrote accordingly.

Hasse also invokes the judgment of that consummate analyst of U.S. popular song, the late Alec Wilder, who called Carmichael “the most talented, inventive, sophisticated and jazz-oriented of all the great craftsmen,” this to distinguish him ever so slightly from the musical-theater composers (Kern, Gershwin, Berlin) whom Wilder favored.

In fact, Carmichael tried just one musical in his long career, a 1940 collaboration with his favorite lyricist, Johnny Mercer; unfortunately, “Walk With Music” flopped.

And though Carmichael did contribute songs, and eventually himself, to Hollywood films (Wilder dismisses movie music as one grade up from pop music, but one grade down from theater music), his best works stand alone and apart, reflected through the souls of those who sing them, play them and, most important, believe them.

Carmichael was born in Bloomington, Ind., which set him instantly apart from the songwriting mafia--Berlin, Gershwin, Kern--cultivated by and clustered in New York. Carmichael grew up with ragtime and later the jazz of the dance-band era; supple syncopated rhythms became a natural part of Carmichael’s vocabulary, though he is best remembered for his romantic ballads.

Largely self-taught as a musician, Carmichael was aurally intuitive, deeply influenced by his mother--who played piano at college dances and at theaters in the age of silent films--and by a black pianist, Reginald DuValle, who heated up Carmichael’s playing and loosened his compositional approach through improvisation.

Like so many important white musicians and composers, Carmichael was deeply affected by black music. The earliest compositions included here, 1925’s “Riverboat Shuffle” (performed by the Frankie Trumbauer orchestra) and 1926’s “Washboard Blues” (performed by Paul Whiteman and his Concert Orchestra with cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and a palpably nervous Carmichael on piano and vocals) are redolent of the traditional jazz of New Orleans and Southern urban blues, respectively.

Still, “Washboard Blues,” an ambitious short suite of complex tempo-shifting and cultural evocation, already suggests Carmichael’s ability to expand on standard form.

At Indiana University, the young Carmichael at first booked jazz bands, then formed one, the Collegians, and began his songwriting in earnest. Cautious enough to back it up with a law degree, Carmichael gave himself over to music in 1927 when he heard Red Nichols’ version of “Washboard Blues.”

Ironically, the song that would become a virtual synonym for Hoagy Carmichael began its long life in 1927 in a campus hangout, the Book Nook, as “Star Dust,” a strictly instrumental dance tune--and a lively paced one at that.

Two years later, Carmichael’s New York publisher arranged for Mitchell Parish to add some lyrics, though the song retained its dance pace until the Isham Jones Orchestra slowed it down for a 1930 recording. At that point it was off to the races.

“Stardust” may be as familiar as an afterthought these days, but its form and melody line were unconventional in the early ‘30s (Wilder commended the public for accepting it “so enthusiastically and for so many years”). It’s not a particularly easy song to sing or play, but its aching melody and evocation of lost love struck a resonant chord, so it’s intriguing to compare the six recordings offered here.

Louis Armstrong’s 1931 version is still somewhat brisk, more a showcase for that giant’s trumpet and vocals than the song’s sentiments. Clarinetist Artie Shaw’s languid reading in 1940 is definitive, buttressed by Billy Butterfield’s clarion trumpet and a lush arrangement. So is Ella Fitzgerald’s hauntingly eloquent, intimate interpretation with pianist-soul mate Ellis Larkins in 1954. Frank Sinatra is so enthralled with the song’s verse that he focuses his 1961 recording on that alone, omitting the chorus (Artie Shaw had omitted the verse). Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis closes the set with a slow, transcendent 1984 version that reunites verse and chorus over a lovely string arrangement.

All of these readings are as right, as perfect, as they can be. Oddly enough, it’s Carmichael’s own rendition from 1942 that falls flat. Somewhat recast, perhaps as a reaction to the plethora of versions already around, it has little of the warmth of the other Carmichael performances included here.

Many of his songs demanded adept singers, and Carmichael was a stylish interpreter of his own music, despite what he himself described as “my native wood-note and often off-key voice . . . flatsy through the nose.”

“Hong Kong Blues” and “The Monkey Song”--both easily negotiated--are melodically, rhythmically and verbally complex songs. A 1941 recording of “Lazy River,” made in a friend’s home, is loose and private, the work of a man enjoying his own invention.

A quarter of a century after he recorded “Lazy River,” with the tides of popular music having shifted away from Carmichael’s style of music to new generations of singer-songwriters working in the rock medium, he again went into a private session to record a pensive “Serenade to Gabriel,” recalling such long-departed musical peers and friends as Beiderbecke, Glenn Miller and Bunny Berigan. Fourteen years before his death a lonely Carmichael is already looking to join in the heavenly jam session.

After a sojourn in New York City in 1929-36--during which he became a member in good standing of the songwriting fraternity--Carmichael went out to Hollywood, at first to write for films and then, in the mid-’40s, to appear in them, usually behind a piano. The best known were “To Have and Have Not,” “The Best Years of Our Lives” and “Canyon Passage.”

Some made-to-order film songs, which tended to reinforce Carmichael’s own romanticized vision of a more gentle America, are included here. The best: Mildred Bailey’s joyfully exasperated “Small Fry” (from “Sing, You Sinners,” where it was originally sung to Donald O’Connor by Bing Crosby); “Two Sleepy People” (from “Thanks for the Memory,” charmingly sung by Bob Hope and Shirley Ross, but more a showcase for Frank Loesser’s witty lyrics than Carmichael’s mundane melody), and the exuberant “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief” (sung by Betty Hutton in “The Stork Club”).

This last song, along with Carmichael’s own rendition of “Ole Buttermilk Sky” from “Canyon Passage,” invokes--as did many of the songs from this era--certain cultural stereotypes of the time. For those two songs, it was the American Indian; in “Hong Kong Blues” and “The Monkey Song,” it was Asians.

Some songs--notably “Washboard Blues,” “Lazybones” and “Old Man Harlem”--might seem, from today’s vantage point, patronizing or exploitative. But given Carmichael’s keen appreciation and respect for black music, that probably was not the intention.

Of course, responsibility for the lyrics could often be laid on Carmichael’s collaborators (though some of his own lyrics were quite good). In this collection, the complete Carmichaels--”lyrics and music by”--number nine, the best being an uncharacteristically worldly “Hong Kong Blues,” “The Monkey Song,” “I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes),” “Charlie Two-Step” (a delightful novelty tune recorded by the Boswell Sisters in 1932) and “Rockin’ Chair.”

“Classic Carmichael” is chock full of gems: Sinatra recording a maudlin “The Lamplighter’s Serenade” in 1942 for his first solo session; the Claude Hopkins orchestra and singer Fred Norman (actually, more of a reciter here) offering a “Lazybones” so languid it almost drips off the turntable; sessions from the bands of Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and the hands of pianists Hank Jones and Dave McKenna; readings from Maxine Sullivan, Kate Smith, Mel Torme, Carmen McRae, Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday (a bittersweet “Georgia on My Mind” that counters Ray Charles’ exultant, definitive interpretation, also included).

“The Classic Hoagy Carmichael” is available for $37.95 at Smithsonian Museum shops; by mail from the Smithsonian Collection of Recordings, P.O. Box 23345, Washington, D.C. 20026; from the Indiana Historical Society, 315 West Ohio St., Indianapolis, Ind. 46202; or by phone from either IHS at (317) 232-1882 or SCR at (800) 678-2675. Add $3.49 for shipping.