Up a Lazy River: The Genius of Hoagy Carmichael

Just like the laconic, drawling pianist he played in the 1945 Humphrey Bogart film To Have and to Have Not, Hoagy Carmichael was himself the caricature of a jive talking jazznick, a sort of pre-21st century version of Tom Waits (if they ever produce a movie about Carmichael's life, Waits has to get the lead part), and like Waits, the line between Carmichael's public persona and his private one is almost impossible to perceive. What is clear, though, is that Carmichael was a phenomenal songwriter with an ability to write romantically about things other than romance. Oh, he could write love songs, and he did, many of them, but his biggest hits as a composer have tended to be songs that are really carefully crafted hymns to states of mind, to ways of being and thinking, rather than love songs in the normal sense. His best-known piece, the enduring "Stardust" (which amazingly enough began life under the title "Barnyard Shuffle"), for instance, although it sounds like a love song, is really a song about thinking about a love song, which is a whole different thing altogether, and "Georgia on My Mind," another Carmichael classic, is nothing less than a statement of devotion to a place, and past that, a place in mind. Likewise, both "Lazy River" and "Lazybones" are about ways of being, while "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" is literally a song about the time of day. Carmichael recorded extensively throughout his career, but he wasn't necessarily his own best interpreter, which is why this fine set of covers tracked between 1926 and 1951 makes good sense as an introduction to this unique American voice. Included here are Bing Crosby's sublime version of "Stardust" from 1931, a classic and wonderfully immediate vocal duet by Jack Teagarden and Louis Armstrong on "Rockin' Chair" from 1947, the Mills Brothers' timeless take on "Lazy River" from 1941, Johnny Mercer's rendition of "Lazybones" from 1933 (the song had been a hit for the Mills Brothers earlier that same year), and Crosby and Jane Wyman's 1951 duet on "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" (drawn from the movie Here Comes the Groom, the song won Best Song at the Academy Awards that year). These are marvelous songs, and marvelous performances, and they spotlight a writing talent who found a way to make music that was pure Americana decades before anyone even began to grasp what such a thing was.