Few things generate biographical indigestion like autobiographies--which blend fact and fiction in subtle ways. Hoagy Carmichael is an especially difficult biographical subject because he wrote three autobiographies, two of which were published. The Stardust Road came first in 1945. It's a curious book, celebrating Hoagy's youth and college years in a stream of consciousness style narrative. In some ways, it is disarmingly honest. In others, it is subtly romanticized. Twenty years later, Carmichael published another autobiography, Sometimes I Wonder, with novelist and Hollywood scriptwriter, Stephen Longstreet. It also has a breezy, informal surface but selects details more carefully.

It is fortunate, therefore, that Carmichael's first biographer is the experienced and capable Richard M. Sudhalter. Sudhalter's first important book, Bix: Man and Legend, with Philip R. Evans, was published in 1974. It remains the single best book on Bix Beiderbecke. More to the point, researching it gave Sudhalter a solid background on Hoagy Carmichael and Indiana jazz history. Stardust Melody contains the two strengths I have come to expect from a Sudhalter biography: clear, graceful writing and solid, thorough research. I am happy to say that it does not contain the one weakness I sometimes find in Sudhalter's work--excessively technical musical analyses. Sudhalter discusses Carmichael's songs with care and intelligence, but he does so in a way that lay readers can understand and enjoy.

I have long been a Hoagy Carmichael fan, and I wondered how much new information Sudhalter would be able to turn up. The answer is--a lot. I did not know, for example, that several years before The Stardust Road, Carmichael wrote an unpublished autobiographical narrative, Jazzbanders. It contains significant details not included in the published works, and Sudhalter does a skillful job of using that text to untangle fact from legend and rumor.

I also did not know much about Carmichael as a lyricist. Like most people, I assumed that he sometimes wrote his own lyrics and sometimes didn't. The truth, as Sudhalter demonstrates, is more complex. Carmichael, in fact, had a strong hand in writing many lyrics not credited to him, like "Georgia on My Mind." The Carmichael papers reveal lots of interesting information about song genesis, development and revision, and Sudhalter's discussions of these matters are interesting.

Sometimes the truth can be unwelcome, however. I have long enjoyed the story of "I Get Along Without You Very Well." How it started as an anonymous poem in a small magazine. How many years later Hoagy put a musical melody to the words. How it couldn't be published until the poet was found. How a nationwide search was undertaken to find the poet. How she was finally found in a Philadelphia apartment, a elderly recluse who didn't read the papers or listen to the radio, and how she died less than twenty-four hours before her song with Hoagy was introduced on a nationwide radio broadcast. A good bit of the story is true, but some of the more dramatic details apparently aren't. Again, Carmichael apparently shaped the details as he retold the story numerous times over the years.

In short, this book is everything I hoped it would be. One comes away with a clear sense of Carmichael's place in American music and a detailed knowledge of his life and career. Sudhalter provides a good picture of Carmichael's personal strengths and weaknesses without getting lost in psychological analysis. This is a worthy book for a worthy subject.