Hoagy Carmichael

Hoagland Howard Carmichael (November 22, 1899 – December 27, 1981) was an American musician, composer, songwriter, actor and lawyer.

Hoagland Howard "Hoagy" Carmichael was born in Bloomington, Indiana, on November 22, 1899.

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" that 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, played accompaniment at silent movie theaters and private parties to earn extra income.

Hoagy had two younger sisters, Georgia and Joanne.

Because of Clyde's unstable job history the family moved frequently.

Hoagy lived for most of his early years in Bloomington and in Indianapolis, Indiana.

In 1910, the Carmichaels moved to Missoula, Montana.

Carmichael's mother taught him to sing and play the piano at an early age.

With the exception of some piano lessons in Indianapolis with Reginald DuValle, a bandleader and pianist known as "the elder statesman of Indiana jazz" and billed as "the Rhythm King", Carmichael had no other musical training.

The family moved to Indianapolis in 1916, but Carmichael returned to Bloomington in 1919 to complete high school.

For musical inspiration Carmichael would listen to ragtime pianists Hank Wells and Hube Hanna.

At 18, Carmichael helped supplement his family's meager income by doing manual jobs in construction, at a bicycle chain factory, and in a slaughterhouse.

This bleak time was partially relieved by piano duets with his mother and by his friendship with DuValle, who taught him piano-jazz improvisation.

Carmichael earned $5 playing at a fraternity dance in 1918, marking the beginning of his professional musical career.

The death of Carmichael's three-year-old sister in 1918 (possibly from the Spanish flu pandemic) affected him deeply.

He later wrote "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."

Around 1922 Carmichael first met Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke, a cornetist and sometime pianist from Iowa.

The two became friends and played music together.

Around 1923, during a visit to Chicago, Beiderbecke introduced Carmichael to Louis Armstrong, with whom Carmichael would later collaborate, while Armstrong was playing with Chicago-based King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band.

Carmichael's first recorded song, initially titled "Free Wheeling", was written for Beiderbecke, whose band, The Wolverines, recorded it as "Riverboat Shuffle" in 1924 for Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana.

The song became a jazz staple.

Carmichael attended Indiana University Bloomington, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1925 and a law degree in 1926.

He was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity, and played the piano around Indiana and Ohio with his band, Carmichael's Collegians.

The band's instrumental rendition of "Washboard Blues", recorded on May 19, 1925, was the earliest recording in which Carmichael performed his own songs, 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 legal firm, but he returned to Indiana in 1927 after failing the Florida bar exam.

He joined an Indianapolis law firm (Bingham, Mendenhall and Bingham) and passed the Indiana bar, but devoted most of his energies to music.

Carmichael had discovered his method of songwriting, which he described later: "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 was one of the most successful Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the 1930s, and was among the first singer-songwriters in the age of mass media to utilize new communication technologies such as television, microphones, and sound recordings.

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" (lyrics by Mitchell Parish), "Georgia on My Mind" (lyrics by Stuart Gorrell), "The Nearness of You" (lyrics by Ned Washington), and "Heart and Soul" (lyrics by Frank Loesser).

He also collaborated with lyricist Johnny Mercer on "Lazybones" and "Skylark".

Armstrong would continue to influence Carmichael's compositions; Carmichael reflected in a letter to his wife in the early 1930s that he was going to see Armstrong to learn about the "purty notes".

Under Beiderbecke's influence Carmichael began playing 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.

(Mitchell Parish's lyrics were added in 1939.) Carmichael's other early musical compositions included "Washboard Blues" and "Boneyard Shuffle", which Curtis Hitch and his band, Hitch's Happy Harmonists, recorded at the Gennett studios.

Carmichael's "Ole Buttermilk Sky" was an Academy Award nominee in 1946, from Canyon Passage, in which he co-starred as a musician riding a mule.

"In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening", with lyrics by Mercer, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1951.

Carmichael also appeared as a character actor and musical performer in 14 films, hosted three musical-variety radio programs, performed on television, and wrote two autobiographies.