STARDUST MELODY

Jazz trumpeter and music writer Sudhalter (Lost Chords, 1999) details with considerable musical analysis the rise of an especially American tunesmith.

Hoagland Howard Carmichael (1899–1981) was born in the heartland of the nation, between the hot jazz capitals of Chicago and New Orleans. With him was born a special kind of easy and tuneful popular music: think “Rockin’ Chair,” “Skylark,” “Buttermilk Sky,” “Georgia on My Mind,” and, of course, “Stardust,” frequently proclaimed the best popular song ever written back when popular songs mattered. Hoagy always retained his Hoosier values, sentiments, and prejudices. In the same trade as Tin Pan Alley and Broadway contemporaries Berlin, Porter, Arlen, Kern, and Gershwin, Carmichael had his own persona, less urban and more midwestern, much in the vein of fellow Indianan James Whitcomb Riley. That nature enabled him to pursue a career in Hollywood as a successful character actor as well as a composer. A natural at the upright and the prototypical singer/songwriter/performer, he was never proficient in reading or writing music. But the talented autodidact worked with the best in the business; their names, including Johnny Mercer, Louis Armstrong, and particularly Bix Beiderbecke, form an evocative catalogue. As it did to many, the advent of rock ’n’ roll finally sent the old music master to his rocking chair. Sudhalter’s biography is researched well enough to debunk much of the composer’s reminisces (one claim is labeled “hogwash”). Included are staves and staves of examples and musical dissection; we are instructed, for example, that the first bars of “Hong Kong Blues” lack chromatic steps and avoid the subdominant (fourth) and leading tone (seventh). Readers who aren’t entirely proficient in musical theory will want to seize the recordings that will be released simultaneously with the biography. So may everyone, come to think of it.

Despite occasionally reading like program notes or liner text, an apt and able bio of a singular talent.