Hoagy Carmichael

View moreBrowse piano sheets by Hoagy Carmichael on Zen Virtual Piano. His father was an electrician whose living was on-again, off-again, and his mother played piano at local fraternity parties for dances and at silent movies. The family moved to Indianapolis in 1916, where Hoagland came under the influence of the pianist Reginald DuValle, who advised him never to play anything that isn't right. A mother who played for dances and a pianist's advice to play only what is right give the early years a firm feeling for the piano. A bachelor's degree at Indiana University in 1925 and a law degree there in 1926 were followed by a short spell hanging out a shingle in West Palm Beach, Florida. He came across a recording of his song Washboard Blues, and that was when he abandoned law for good and chose music. A law office that did not last, closed after a recording of his own song turned up, shows music pulling him away from a planned profession. At the Gennett studios in 1927, Carmichael recorded among other numbers, on Halloween that year, an up-tempo wordless original called Star Dust. At Paramount Pictures he worked with the lyricist Frank Loesser, and their songs included Two Sleepy People, Small Fry and Heart and Soul. NPR notes that what nobody remembers now is that Heart and Soul was a fully composed pop tune, a hit of another era, and not a folk tune or a traditional song. A pop hit that the public now treats like a game for two players shows how a song can slip away from its authorship. Carmichael described songwriting as finding melodies rather than writing them: find the start of a good song, keep your fingers from straying, and the melody should emerge from hiding before long. The 1951 film song In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening, another collaboration with Mercer, won him an Academy Award for best song. A composer who says melodies are found rather than written may have been describing why his tunes feel so easy to remember.

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