Artist: Hoagy Carmichael

Hoagland Howard Carmichael was an American musician, composer, songwriter, actor and lawyer. 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, electronic microphones, and sound recordings. 

Carmichael composed several hundred songs, including 50 that achieved hit record status. He is best known for composing the music for "Stardust", "Georgia on My Mind" (lyrics by Stuart Gorrell), "The Nearness of You", and "Heart and Soul" (in collaboration with lyricist Frank Loesser), four of the most-recorded American songs of all time. 

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

Hoagland Howard "Hoagy" Carmichael was born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1899. Carmichael attended Indiana University Bloomington, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1925 and a law degree in 1926. After deciding that a career in law was not for him, he 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." 

During a visit to Chicago, Carmichael met Louis Armstrong, with whom he would later collaborate, while Armstrong was playing with Chicago-based King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. Armstrong would continue to influence Carmichael's compositions.

Carmichael sang, but because he lacked the vocal strength to sing without amplification on stage, as well as the rather unusual tone of his voice, which he described as "flatsy through the nose", he took advantage of new technologies, especially the electrical microphone, sound amplification, and advances in recording.

The Great Depression had rapidly put an end to the jazz scene of the Roaring Twenties. People were no longer attending clubs or buying music, forcing many musicians out of work. Carmichael was fortunate to retain his low-paying but stable job as a songwriter with music company Southern Music in New York. Of that time, he wrote later: "I was tiring of jazz and I could see that other musicians were tiring as well. The boys were losing their enthusiasm for the hot stuff…. No more hot licks, no more thrills." 

Carmichael's eulogy for "hot" jazz, however, was premature. Big-band swing was just around the corner, and jazz soon turned in another direction with new bandleaders, such as the Dorseys and Benny Goodman, and new singers, such as Bing Crosby, leading the way. Carmichael's output followed the changing trend. In 1933 he began a long-lasting collaboration with lyricist Johnny Mercer, newly arrived in New York, on "Lazybones", which became a hit.

His contribution to the war effort was like other patriotic efforts by Irving Berlin ("This Is the Army, Mr. Jones"), Johnny Mercer ("G.I. Jive"), and Frank Loesser ("Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition"). Carmichael's wartime songs (most with lyrics by Paul Francis Webster) included "My Christmas Song for You", "Don't Forget to Say 'No' Baby", "Billy-a-Dick", "The Army of Hippocrates", "Cranky Old Yank", "Eager Beaver", "No More Toujours L'Amour", "Morning Glory", and the never-completed "Hitler Blues".