Hoagy Carmichael

Career overview

Hoagland Howard Hoagy Carmichael was born on November 22, 1899, in Bloomington, Indiana, and died on December 27, 1981. He was an American musician, composer, songwriter, pianist, singer, actor, author, bandleader, and lawyer who was educated at Indiana University, where he earned an LL.B and played piano in college bands before eventually giving up his law practice for a career in songwriting. He is recognized as one of the most successful Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the 1930s and 1940s and was among the first singer-songwriters in the age of mass media to use new communic. American composer and author Alec Wilder wrote in American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 that Carmichael was the most talented, inventive, sophisticated, and jazz-oriented of the hundreds of writers composing pop songs in the first half of the twentieth century.

Carmichael is best known for composing the music for Stardust, Georgia on My Mind, The Nearness of You, and Heart and Soul, which are four of the most-recorded American songs of all time. His notable works also include Ole Buttermilk Sky. In addition to his songwriting and composing career, Carmichael was an actor with thirty-four known credits on the Movie Database, including an acting role in To Have and Have Not.