"Stardust"

Hoagy Carmichael was not quite 28 years old when he wrote what music historians consider THE song of the 20th century.

Just how big is “Stardust” in the Great American Songbook?

• Well, for starters, this is a song that has been recorded as an instrumental or a vocal more than 1,500 times.

• Forty years after its publication in 1928, it was still earning more than $50,000 annually in royalties.

• The lyrics that Mitchell Parish later brought to Hoagy’s song have been translated into 30 languages.

“Stardust” simply is “the most-recorded song in the history of the world,” music curator John Edward Hasse of the Smithsonian Institution once told John Barbour of The Associated Press, “and that right there qualifies it as it as the song of the century.”

The closest competitor, he said, is “Yesterday” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and, at No. 3, W.C. Handy's “St. Louis Blues.”

Young Hoagy and His Song

Late summer 1927 found Hoagy Carmichael back home in Indiana after a romp in Florida; the young man was hanging out near the campus of Indiana University, from which he had graduated a few years earlier.

As he related in his first autobiography, The Stardust Road, in 1946:

It was a hot night, sweet with the death of summer and the hint and promise of fall. A waiting night, a night marking time, the end of a season. The stars were bright, close to me, and the North Star hung low over the trees.

I sat down on the “spooning wall” at the edge of the campus and all the things that the town and the university and the friends I had flooded through my mind. Beautiful Kate (Cameron), the campus queen... and Dorothy Kelly. But not one girl — all the girls — young and lovely. Was Dorothy the loveliest? Yes. The sweetest? Perhaps. But most of them had gone their ways. Gone as I'd gone mine....

Never to be 21 again; so in love again. Never feel the things I'd felt. The memory of love's refrain....

Carmichael wrote that he then looked up at the sky, whistling softly, and that the melody flowing from his feelings was “Stardust.” Excited, he ran to a campus hangout where the owner was ready to close. Hoagy successfully begged for a few minutes of piano time so he could solidify that theme in his head.

True?

Is that really how it happened? “What can I say?” historian Hasse told the AP decades later. “It is truly a thing of legend.”

The same year, Carmichael recorded an upbeat instrumental version of the song for Gennett Records. The next year, he left Indiana for New York City after Mills Music hired him as a composer.

The Reception Widens

West Virginian Don Redman recorded the song in the same year, and by 1929 it was performed regularly by Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club; however, it was Isham Jones’ 1930 rendition that made the song popular on radio, prompting multiple acts to record it.

For instance, in 1936, RCA released double-sided versions of “Stardust,” Tommy Dorsey on one side and Benny Goodman on the other.

Then 1940 was a banner year, with releases of the song by Frank Sinatra, Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller. Since then, “Stardust” has entered the repertoire of every serious jazz singer and instrumentalist around the world.

Willie’s Version

In 1978, country superstar Willie Nelson surprised fans with his release of his Star Dust album, which went golden after staying on the best-seller charts for more than 135 weeks.

Nelson recalled singing it in the Austin, Texas, Opera House. “There was a kind of stunned silence in the crowd for a moment, and then they exploded with cheering and whistling and applauding. The kids thought ‘Stardust’ was a new song I had just written….”

Our Take on the Tune

Since its composition nearly a hundred years ago now, this song has been performed by many folks as a slow, romantic ballad, drawing out the words and the melody.

Good for them. However, when Hoagy wrote this classic, he performed it with a bit of the sass and sway that characterized the jazz of his day, and we in The Flood like to carry on that tradition.

The song has some of the best chords of anything in our repertoire and in this take from last week’s rehearsal you’ll hear two solos in which Danny Cox is finding all kinds of interesting ideas. Click here to come along on his quest.

More from Year 2024?

It’s been a busy, interesting year in the Floodisphere, with lots of new tunes as well as re-imaginings of old ones from The Flood’s songbag.

If you’d like to join us in a little auld-lang-synery, our free Radio Floodango music streaming features a randomized playlist built around the tunes in all the weekly podcasts of the year. Click here to give Year 2024 a re-listen.