They're Playing Our Song

In Italy it is called Polvere di Stelle, and ranks with O Sole Mio as an alltime favorite. In Japan it is called Sutaadasuto, and is one number record stores are not afraid to overorder. In England, where professionals call it a "gone evergreen," no song has sold more copies. In the U.S. it is called Stardust, and is the nation's most durable hit--comfortable as an old shoe, and yet rare as a glass slipper.

Its publishers are currently celebrating its 25th anniversary. Actually, the song was born in the summer of 1927, but its fame was delayed. It all began when a young Indianapolis lawyer named Hoagland Carmichael went back for a visit to Indiana University. He "spent the lonely night, dreaming of a song," and he liked it. He found a piano and picked out the tune. It was a lively little ditty, and that was the way Hoagy, as piano man with the famed Jean Goldkette orchestra, played it the next year. It bothered almost nobody until Bandleader Isham Jones recorded it in a haunting lento. Jones's violin soloist "played it pretty," says Hoagy, "with feeling--to bring out the melody--and pretty soon it began to make a noise on Broadway." A rising lyricist named Mitchell Parish was commissioned to write lyrics, and Stardust became history.

Best of All. By 1933 most people seemed to be singing Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?, but a 20-year-old Indiana girl, mortally wounded in a shooting, asked to have Stardust played at her funeral. Three years later the record business was stirred almost as deeply, when RCA Victor dared to release the song on two sides of a pop single, one played by Benny Goodman, the other by Tommy Dorsey. It was Victor's best seller in 1936 and '38, was still going strong a year later.

News of war in Europe failed to dislodge Stardust from the public soul. A Colorado vacationer climbed to the top of Lookout Mountain, where he discovered eight boys and girls around a campfire, eyes closed, singing in close harmony, with the professionalism of Glenn Miller's sax section. Their song: Stardust.

By 1944 Carmichael's ditty was ringing round the world, useful, so they both believed, to friend and foe. In the Philippines a native combo dewed the eyes of the crew of an LST with a proud performance of Stardust. In Burma U.S. troops heard Tokyo Rose play it at midnight. In Tokyo a Japanese journalist named Tateishi and two pals huddled in a closet during a B-29 raid, listening to Stardust on a portable phonograph.

Even peace was wonderful for Stardust. In 1949 readers of Metronome, venerable U.S. music magazine, voted it "best song of all time." Last year Stardust's kiss was still an inspiration, or at least a consolation: one of the most intricate of modern jazzmen, Pianist Dave Brubeck, played a tune at Manhattan's Basin Street that only two members of the audience recognized as Stardust, while in the dance hall around the corner, the ten-millionth blonde said. "Oooooh, listen, honey. They're playing our song."

Plenty of Scope. What makes Stardust so durable? The lyrics for one thing: they contain just the right proportions of imagination, sentimentality and corn:

Beside a garden wall, when stars are bright, You are in my arms The nightingale tells his fairytale Of paradise where roses grow.

But the tune itself is the important thing. It is constructed of broken chords, half in bright major modes, half in overcast minors, which give it a moonlit softness. The melody has a kind of singleness of purpose--and gives plenty of scope to jazz improvisers. The song's overall form is unusual--it uses long sentences, and its main theme is repeated only once. To the music trade, that once meant it was "difficult," but in the long run it made the tune interesting enough to stick in the public memory.

Stardust has already brought Composer Carmichael, 55, a fat $250,000 in royalties, earns him $15,000-$20,000 a year. ("Every time it is played in the presence of my wife," Hoagy likes to say, "she stands up and bows down.") But Carmichael, who has long since branched out into the movies as an actor (The Best Years of Our Lives), would hate to be remembered as a one-hit composer. "Actually," he says with legalistic caution, "I have what is considered, in the minds of the musical fraternity, 35 hits." Among them: Lazy River, Lazy Bones, Two Sleepy People, In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening, Rockin' Chair.

Lawyer Hoagy Carmichael (he has not practised for years) may not have written any of his nation's laws, but he has surely written one of its great songs.

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