Word: stardust
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Songwriter Hoagy (Stardust) Carmichael was not sure he was quite up to the job. "I know my limitations . . . I'm not a student of music." But on the other hand, he did have an idea, and he was a native Indianian, and that was more than most of the other invited composers could say as they began to compose short symphonic pieces for the centennial of Hoosier Poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916). "I got on the telephone with [Indianapolis Symphony Conductor] Fabien Sevitzky and told him what I had in mind," said Hoagy. "He encouraged...
...Hoagy can almost support his family (a wife and two young sons) on the income from Stardust, written in 1929. Says he: "It's practically an annuity." He still felt "like a rank amateur" after his first long-haired composition, but he confessed he was already at work on a second. This one, he said, would be about the California redwoods and would be "sort of austere, with an ecclesiastic, cathedral-like quality . . . 'Lofty' I think would be a good word...
Others attempted more precise analysis: "It's all right to play Ravel, but not with this band and not in a place where people want to dance. Artie is O.K. when he plays the Shaw stuff that everyone likes-like Stardust. But most of the time he's too kittenish, too much cat." Said another: "His orchestrations are awful, he's imitating too many other bands." Actually, Artie had been using a good many of his original ten-year-old dance orchestrations...
Best song of all time: Hoagy Carmichael's Stardust...
...Hollywood tunesmiths were singing the blues. "Every producer wants a song just like some other song. They want another Stardust. We write it for 'em. But it's tough. We have to please the publishers, the song pluggers, the singers, the disc jockeys and the public. But before we even get that far, we have to keep the musical director, the producer, the star and the director happy. If Betty Button's hairdresser doesn't like your stuff, brother, you're dead...