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Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael

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We owe Richard Sudhalter for preserving the often-forgotten history of America's early jazz pioneers and composers. His subjects are white musicians, but he doesn't write about them with a nasty political agenda. He just doesn't want their contributions to be forgotten. Along the way, he pays warm tribute to the black musicians who led the musical revolution. Unfortunately, politically-charged reviewers refuse to see this.
I especially love this Sudhalter work. Sadly, Hoagy is becoming a forgotten genius of American song. Duke Ellington once called him America's greatest songwriter, and Sudhalter goes a long way in providing the evidence to such a claim. I especially enjoyed the focus on Hoagy's home state of Indiana, which was an amazing hotbed for jazz in the 1920s. One should take this book and drive around Bloomington, Indiana, and find all of the haunts described in rich detail by Sudhalter. Then go to Indianapolis, and Richmond, Indiana. Sudhalter really did us all a huge favor in providing such a wonderful document.

My father, Bud Dant, is prominently featured in this book, as a man who helped Hoagy write down Stardust and I grew up hearing about the stories and now here they all are in a book...not just a book, but what I know is an extremely accurate and real account of Hoagy's life...the writing is terrific and Richard's obvious love of the music and times shows in his accounts...I know for a fact he researched this material exhaustively...it shows! It pretty much dwarfs all other books on Hoagy.

Whatta life! From poverty to great wealth based on musical talent of creating songs as well as a wonderful actor. He had many highlights writing songs and acting but after rock & roll took over the musical scene his talents went for nothing as no youth were interested.

Mr. Sudhalter covers Hoagy's entire life and an interesting one it was. The writing in many places is of a "text book" nature, but the content of relating Hoagy's life puts the reader in the center of life as it existed in the 20's through the 60's. Apparently Hoagy's type of music is gone forever which is a loss without question. New generations continue on and what was usually stays behind as merely history.

STARDUST MELODY: THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF HOAGY CARMICHAEL by Richard M. Sudhalter
published by Oxford University Press in 2002.

Stardust Melody: the life of Hoagy Carmichael is a fine biography by Richard M. Sudhalter about the composer of Stardust and many other fine, sometimes wistful popular songs which seemed to gain their peak of popularity from the mid 1930s into the early 1950s.

Composer Hoagy Carmichael was sometimes pictured as a somewhat passive vessel of fine pop tunes which apparently came to him by divine inspiration with just a minimal amount of keyboard labor. But the truth is, as Mr. Sudhalter points out,
that hard work begets inspiration as much if not more than anything else.
And Hoagy Carmichael,despite his "nothin' to it" demeanor labored mightily for many of his tunes including some of those that were not commercially successful but were nontheless beautiful compositions.

Mr. Sudhalter recreates the world of Hoagy Carmichael, who once he got on board the Hollywood Movie Music express became a fairly wealthy man who did not have to worry about his next meal, much less his family's welfare. Hoagy Carmichael
prospered in that world and did not want to leave it, building one success upon another but never forgetting his jazz background and always seemed to maintain a sense of authenticity around him because of that background.

Hoagy Carmichael became a successful actor because of that sense of authenticity around him, and his laid back comfortable persona was used in more than a few films and even for one season, a late 1950s TV western series.
Mr. Carmichael did become bitter with the accesenscion of rock and roll and the loss of his musical popularity but he still wrote songs, most of which were not published or, after a while, even submitted to publishers.

This biography chronicles all of the above and much more, it's a fascinating look into the life of one of our most original composers of the classic standard era and
a glimpse of a world that will always somehow seem golden to many of us.

It is a biography that is deserved by the composer of Skylark, Stardust, Georgia On my Mind and so many more lyrical pop standards.

Hoagy Carmichael was one of the most influential jazz composers of the 20th century and wrote some of the great standards from the accepted "American Songbook." When we fall in love with the songs of any great songwriter, we often forget the negative factors that shaped their lives. This biography offers a fair portrayal of a great artist, but also a man with very human failings. Learning of his early feelings of inadequacy and insecurity only made me hear his music with a greater sensitivity to its beauty.

Hoagy Carmichael's college roommate, Hank Wells, claimed all his life that Hoagy, consciously or subcon- scioujsly, stole Star Dust from him. People in his home- town of Lake Bluff, Ill., said that this "broke his heart." Wells visited back and forth with the parents of a friend of mine, and she personally heard him tell this story. He played piano at her wedding..
I have read Hoagy's own words about Star Dust quoted in a book and they are cryptic. He does indeed imply that the song came out of nowhere into his mind.
Two facts: (a) What if a man wrote one great song that was unusual and never wrote another? Why is that?
(b) Why could one man write such a great song and then
never equal or exceed it in his long writing career. Why?
Only one set of facts fits that scenario. Hank Wells, heartbroken, never wrote again. Hoagy couldn't write anything so good on his own.

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