A Composer With Charm and a Song for Everyone

Although probably best known today for his hit song “Stardust,” Hoagy Carmichael was a prolific, versatile composer for all seasons and for all voices.

There’s a Carmichael song out there for virtually every singer from just about any background, whether in jazz (Hoagy’s real artistic heart and soul), pop, classical or country.

And there are great songs aplenty even for plain, ordinary people, vocalist wannabes who, much like Hoagy himself, have truly dreadful, flat-sounding, nasal voices that can barely lug a tune from one simple four-beat bar to another.

Carmichael had a knack for writing tunes that make everyone, even the weakest warblers, want to sing along, or at least hum along, to his mesmerizing melodic lines for lyrical masterworks like “The Nearness of You” or “Skylark.” You don’t have to be Ray Charles to launch into “Georgia on My Mind,” even if the prime venue for your concertizing is your shower stall.

And if there ever was a Populist piece for all of the world’s musically challenged, it would have to be Carmichael’s infamous “Heart and Soul.” You might have thought that this tune, which has been thumped to death so heartlessly in four-handed piano duets by countless tots and drunken bar-room Paderewskis, wasn’t actually composed by human hand.

Besides being a master composer and preeminent pop Populist, Carmichael projected the image of a breezy, eminently likable character--glib, funny and loyal. On and off screen, he became identified as a jaunty character in dress and demeanor. Almost always, he’d be seen wearing a hat on the back of his head in a kind of devil-may-care gesture. Mostly, he avoided ties, or any sign of stuffy formality.

And long before the surgeon general’s report linked tobacco with cancer, he seemed to have a cigarette perpetually dangling from his lips as he sat by the keyboard. Smoking was hip back then. And in a really nice, nonthreatening way, so was Hoagy. His piano-playing character was everybody’s favorite sidekick on and off the screen, cool, jazzy and as much in the American grain as Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper.

Carmichael was born Nov. 22, 1899, in Bloomington, Ind. He died in 1981, less than two years after the Newport Jazz Festival honored him with a tribute concert at Carnegie Hall.

As part of a national celebration of Carmichael’s centennial, two significant albums have recently been reissued on CD, “The Great Jazz Vocalists Sing Hoagy Carmichael” (Capitol Jazz) and “Hoagy Sings Carmichael With the Pacific Jazzmen” (Pacific Jazz).

If there were ever proof of the stylistically mixed bag of singers who love the Carmichael repertoire, “The Great Jazz Vocalists Sing” would be it. Performers include singers Dick Haymes (“The Nearness of You”), Dinah Shore (“Moon Country”), Nat King Cole (“Stardust”) and Cassandra Wilson (“Skylark”).

A 1956 release, “Hoagy Sings Carmichael,” brings the composer back full circle to his jazz roots. It’s one of his finest recordings. Carmichael is in superb company. Arranger Johnny Mandel conducts an all-star band featuring elegant contributions from alto saxophonist Art Pepper and trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison.

Carmichael certainly can’t sing in any conventional sense of the word. He has little range, no dynamics, sings through his nose and has a down-home kind of twang. And often the original melody--the one he himself wrote--just serves as some sort of handy but nonbinding guidepost of where he’s going musically. On “Lazy River,” he gives, at best, little more than an oblique reference to the melody.

But despite his many technical drawbacks, he’s still somehow a singer of enormous charm. Totally unpretentious, casual, cool and amusing, he’s as American as Tom and Huck lazing along the Mississippi on a splendid, sunny afternoon.