Songs and Their Singers, Part Two

This review originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News.

STARDUST MELODY: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael
By Richard M. Sudhalter
Oxford, 432 pp., $19.95 paperback

STARDUST MELODIES: A Biography of Twelve of America's Most Popular Songs
By Will Friedwald
Chicago Review Press, 397 pp., $16.95 paperback

Two books, good ones, with almost the same title: ''Stardust Melody,'' a biography of Hoagy Carmichael, and ''Stardust Melodies,'' a look at a dozen classic American popular songs. Don't publishers read each other's catalogs?

Both titles allude to Mitchell Parish's lyrics to Carmichael's ''Star Dust'' -- a song about the way music takes hold of memory. And both books put Carmichael squarely at the center of the great flowering of American popular song that took place from 1920 to 1950. There were composers of the period who were more skilled (George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Duke Ellington), more prolific (Irving Berlin), more sophisticated (Cole Porter). But Carmichael songs like ''Star Dust,'' ''Georgia on My Mind,'' ''Skylark'' and ''The Nearness of You'' stand up to their best.

At an age when other composers were doing apprenticeships on Broadway or Tin Pan Alley, Carmichael was a jazz-mad Kappa Sig at Indiana University, a piano-pounder seeking out any gig he and his cronies could get at Prohibition-era parties -- the Jazz Age in full Midwestern flower. It's the Midwestern character of his music that sets him apart from other major American songwriters of the period: He wasn't Jewish or black or a New Yorker. Even Porter, who like Carmichael was from Indiana, made his reputation by turning himself into the quintessential sophisticated New Yorker and by consciously attempting to write what he called ''Jewish music.''

Carmichael chose a different course: The laid-back quality of much of his music suggests small-town America, not Manhattan. In Richard Sudhalter's view, ''Hoagy Carmichael's songs can evoke place and time as vividly as the work of Edward Hopper or Sinclair Lewis, the essays of H.L. Mencken, or the humor of Will Rogers. But they're not period pieces. They deal with eternal things: youth and age, life and death, a longing for home.''

Carmichael occasionally got sidetracked into Norman Rockwelliana -- saccharine, nostalgic songs like ''Little Old Lady'' and ''Can't Get Indiana off My Mind'' -- and even some of his good songs, like ''Rockin' Chair'' and ''Lazybones,'' now offend many people with their racial stereotypes -- a reminder that Carmichael was of an age when minstrelsy still informed white Americans' images of black people. But his great strength as a songwriter was in his ability to write songs that told stories.

He wasn't restricted by the need to pigeonhole his songs into the plot of a Broadway show -- his one Broadway song score was for a 1940 flop, ''Walk With Music'' -- so he could regularly follow his storytelling instincts. He didn't write simple love songs, Sudhalter observes: ''excepting 'The Nearness of You,' the only love songs for which Hoagy Carmichael is known include a song about a song about love ('Star Dust'), about love as symbolized by a bird ('Skylark'), about the memory of love ('I Get Along Without You Very Well'), and about the effects of a wayward eye on an avian love relationship ('Baltimore Oriole').''

Sudhalter asserts that ''Except for Duke Ellington, whose primary activity was not songwriting, Carmichael is arguably the only major tunesmith whose musical roots are discernibly in jazz.'' ''Arguably'' indeed: Fats Waller, George Gershwin and Harold Arlen also come to mind. But as a jazz musician himself, Sudhalter is well qualified to analyze Carmichael's music, and he fills ''Stardust Melody'' with authoritative technical discussions of it.

Sudhalter is a solid biographer, too. Though he's working under the watchful eye of Carmichael's two sons, he doesn't let them turn his book into either a heart-tugger or a Daddy Dearest tell-all. You learn about Carmichael's feckless father and doting mother, and about his sometimes hand-to-mouth childhood -- he once referred to his family as ''poor white trash.'' And that he could be a crabby and difficult parent and wasn't the easiest person to be married to. But Sudhalter isn't interested in draining the swamp of Carmichael's psyche. His main interest is how, when, where and with whom Carmichael wrote music.

Of ''Star Dust,'' the song that links these two books, Sudhalter says, ''No other song even begins to challenge its unique primacy as a kind of informal national anthem.'' Will Friedwald says ''its construction, its history, and its unique place in the celestial firmament of essential American music stamp it as a song like no other.''

The construction, history and place in what he calls the ''celestial firmament'' (is there any other kind of firmament?) of 12 great popular songs is the subject of Friedwald's informative and witty book. In addition to ''Star Dust,'' he discusses ''St. Louis Blues,'' ''Mack the Knife,'' ''Ol' Man River,'' ''Body and Soul,'' ''I Got Rhythm,'' ''As Time Goes By,'' ''Night and Day,'' ''Stormy Weather,'' ''Summertime'' and ''Lush Life.''

Friedwald's other books include ''Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer's Art'' and ''Jazz Singing: America's Great Voices From Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond,'' and he was co-author on Tony Bennett's memoir, ''The Good Life.'' So naturally this book contains critiques of recordings by the greats -- Bennett and Sinatra, as well as Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and others.

He also pays attention to such undervalued performers as Bobby Darin (whose ''Mack the Knife'' Friedwald calls ''one of the great pop records of all time''), Martha Raye (yes, she of the denture cream commercials -- he cites her recording of ''Ol' Man River,'' though he surprisingly overlooks her intense ''Body and Soul''), Kate Smith (for her ''especially frisky'' 1930 version of ''I Got Rhythm'') and Vic Damone (a ''master'' who unfortunately leaves songs ''bereft of irony or the deeper meaning that Sinatra always finds,'' but whose ''My Funny Valentine'' is ''the best pop version after Sinatra'').


Bobby Darin

And he likes to raise a few hackles. Barbra Streisand lovers will wince at his faint praise for her recording of ''As Time Goes By'' made in 1964 -- ''back in the days when she still knew what a good song was (and was able to convince us that she also knew what things like sighs and kisses were).'' And he has no taste for rock singers reworking the classics: U2's ''overlong and overbaked treatment'' of ''Night and Day,'' he says, ''seems deliberately designed to camouflage the inescapable fact that nobody involved in the production can sing or play an instrument.'' And of Janis Joplin's ''infamous'' version of ''Summertime'' he comments, ''Joplin's sound is raw and powerful -- but, then, the same thing could be said about a sledgehammer.''


U2

Janis Joplin

The criticisms are just, but while neither version is one I'd want to have on a desert island -- that would be Astaire's or Fitzgerald's ''Night and Day'' and Vaughan's or Leontyne Price's ''Summertime'' -- I have to admit that I enjoy the obsessive-propulsiveness of U2's rendition and the sheer intensity of Joplin's. But then arguing with the criticisms is most of the fun of books like this one.

Ella Fitzgerald

Sarah Vaughan

I wish ''Stardust Melodies'' had musical notation and the full text of the lyrics, and an index would be nice -- it's not just that it's frustrating to comb back through the book in search of comments on a performer, but Friedwald's book is so full of good stuff that I kept being distracted and forgetting what I was looking for.

And in the end, it occurs to me that the look-alike titles of these books are so appropriate as to be almost inevitable. For the best popular music is both elemental and ephemeral -- like stardust.