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“He had [music] pouring out of him. He couldn’t stop and didn’t want to stop.”

I recently interviewed Hoagy Bix Carmichael for the Carmichael Clan USA’s quarterly newsletter about growing up as the son of one of the most successful and recognizable songwriters of the 20th century, Hoagy Carmichael. We talked about his dad, his dad’s music, and the unique accomplishments in Hoagy Bix’s own life. 

To say that Hoagy Bix Carmichael grew up around some of the most recognizable names of Hollywood’s Golden Age would be an understatement. Born in 1938, Hoagy Bix grew up in the Holmby Hills mansion formerly owned by Philip K. Wrigley – son of William P. Wrigley, Jr. and heir to the chewing gum magnate’s fortune – located just off Sunset Boulevard in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. His neighborhood directory read like an invitation list to the Academy Awards, with names like Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall. Hoagy Bix didn’t seem to notice, though. “I assumed all dads were like my dad, and you could watch them on TV, and watch them making a film. All these people were just friends. Everybody knew people like Fred Astaire, I thought.” His dad, of course, was the legendary singer/songwriter Hoagland Howard Carmichael, known throughout the world as Hoagy. 

Hoagland “Hoagy” Carmichael was born on November 22, 1899 in four-room cottage located in Bloomington, Indiana. His parents, Howard and Lida, were poor, but eager to do well, and worked hard to make ends meet. They were normal, honest people, and even though Hoagy’s grandmother Carmichael, who had been a Campbell, was said to be related to Queen Anne, Hoagy recalls in his autobiography that “Grandma set more store by the Carmichael plaid than she did by royal connections.” It is said that his mother, Lida, named her son after a “traveling troupe of circus people” that, stranded in Bloomington, had once stayed overnight at the Carmichael home.  Hoagy tells the story, however, that his mother got the name from a surveyor who had lived with the Carmichaels while a new railroad spur was being built nearby. Nevertheless, Lida Carmichael dreamed that her son would one day become president of a railroad, but once Hoagy first touched the ivory keys of his mother’s golden oak upright piano around the age of six, it seemed there was no turning back.

“Dad never received any formal piano lessons – none!” Hoagy Bix noted about his father’s innate musical abilities. Though jazz continued to dominate his life throughout his teens, Hoagy would later go on to attend Indiana University, where he frequently played at fraternity parties with his band called the Carmichael’s Collegians. Hoagy graduated in 1925 with his bachelor’s degree and in 1926 with a law degree, although Carmichael’s biographer, Richard Sudhalter, insightfully describes Hoagy during this time as “the sometime law student.” It was clear that his thoughts never strayed far from his music. It was also during these years at university where he met jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke – the namesake of his future son – who encouraged Hoagy to write music and, thus, helped to forever reshape the course of Hoagy’s life. 

After graduating from law school, Hoagy moved to West Palm Beach, Florida to clerk at the law firm of Carmichael & Carmichael (no relation to Hoagy), but he soon discovered that his passion for law burned nowhere near as intense as his passion for what he called “hot jazz.” Hoagy soon moved back to Indiana to practice law but, truth be told, he dedicated his time and energy to music. Shortly after moving back to Indiana, in 1927, Hoagy wrote – or as he sometimes described it, found – his most famous song, Stardust, which has since become an American standard. From there, his career embarked on a steady climb, with the focus shifting in the mid-1930s away from jazz toward Swing, which when then becoming increasingly popular. He wrote and recorded hits like Georgia on My Mind, Rockin’ Chair, Lazybones, Winter Moon, and with Johnny Mercer Skylark, with whom he also wrote a Broadway musical, Walk With Music.

In 1944, Hoagy made his film debut alongside Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, where he played the hotel bar pianist named Cricket. “He had [music] pouring out of him. He couldn’t stop and didn’t want to stop,” said Hoagy Bix, speaking about his father’s continuous songwriting. In all he wrote around 650 songs, with other hits including Ole Buttermilk Sky, Memphis in June, Heart and Soul, Two Sleepy People, and Baltimore Oriole. Hoagy finally received an Oscar for Best Original Song in 1951 from Bing Crosby’s performance of In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening featured in Paramount’s Here Comes the Groom. 

Through all the success, though, Hoagy Bix Carmichael says that the fame never affected his dad. “Dad was an Indiana guy; his best friends were not celebrities. They were guys like Ralph Malone who ran a motel, or Von Moffatt who had a Chrysler dealership in Ventura.” Hoagy Sr. always found time to be a dad to his children, even helping young Hoagy build his soapbox derby car and cutting his and his brother’s hair. Even though the successful music career of his dad provided the family with a comfortable living, Hoagy assumed that his kids would find their own paths just as he had done and resisted steering them in any particular direction or even providing any sort of lessons for them. “Dad was very Scottish about money, believe me!”

Through this self-discovery process, Hoagy Bix eventually found that he had a passion for golf and worked hard to improve his golf game, eventually becoming a one-handicap golfer. It was at the Bel Air Country Club around age 19 that Hoagy Bix met one of his soon-to-be close friends and frequent golfing partner, Fred Astaire. The two remained close friends until Hoagy Bix eventually moved to New York to become a stockbroker. Before leaving for Wall Street, though, as his way of saying goodbye to Hoagy, Fred Astaire came to pick him up driving Gary Cooper’s Silver Cloud Rolls Royce and drove the two of them to the Santa Anita Racetrack to spend the day at the track.

Hoagy Bix worked as a stockbroker in New York but found the work to be altogether unfulfilling. “I had a lot of fun with a lot of wonderful people, but then quit after six years,” he said. He then went to WGBH in Boston where he worked for public television, made several documentaries, and eventually found his way to Pittsburg where he worked for Fred Rogers producing Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. It was around this time that he said he “got tangled up in this wonderful world of fly fishing and bamboo rods.” He met the world-renowned bamboo rod-maker, Everett Garrison, and studied under Garrison to learn his secrets and techniques. Hoagy later created a highly acclaimed documentary and wrote a book about Garrison. When Garrison died, Hoagy inherited his rod-making tools and began creating bamboo fishing rods using a special rare bamboo only found in a very small area in China. “Just like [my father], I was led inextricably in a direction that other people weren’t concerned with.” 

The willingness of Hoagy Bix to pour himself into his work must have been inherited from his father. Hoagy Sr. was known to be a perfectionist in his composing and would work incessantly on a song for days or even weeks until it met his standards. Hoagy successfully composed until around 1960 when the tsunami that was rock and roll washed over the music industry. “He had song ideas, but they weren’t interested,” Hoagy Bix recalls. “Dad was too much of an iconoclast for [studio work] – he was kind of a loner in that respect. He had his stuff; if you like it, wonderful! If it wasn’t to your taste; that was ok, too.” 

In all, Hoagy appeared in fourteen motion pictures, performing at least one song in each. He made TV appearances in a number of shows including NBC’s western Laramie,The Ford Show with Tennessee Ernie Ford, and later Fred Rogers’ PBS show Old Friends, New Friends. Hoagy even hosted his own PBS show, Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop, for two years. Carmichael successfully composed two songs featured in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and later tried his hand at longer musical composition with the Johnny Appleseed Suite. Despite his relentless work, though, the demand for new songs continued to decline, and he still only had limited, sporadic success at this later point in his career. Hoagy said of the rock and roll revolution, “[it] just knocked me out. I’ve just been floating around in the breeze, I guess.”

As his music and acting career continued to slow, Hoagy Carmichael retuned to the golf links and nearly perfected his game, even earning an invitation to Bing Crosby’s Pebble Beach invitational. He also started painting. In 1971, he was inducted along with Duke Ellington and eight others into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame in New York.  The following year, Indiana University bestowed upon Hoagy an honorary doctorate in music. Little by little his health declined and eventually Hoagland Howard Carmichael passed away on December 27, 1981 and was buried in his hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. Today Hoagy Carmichael is considered by many to be one of the most talented and inspirational songwriters of the 20th century. 

Since embarking on the challenge of creating the world’s finest bamboo fishing rods, Hoagy Bix has also somehow found time for other projects. In 1986, as a nod to his old friend, Fred Astaire, Hoagy Bix helped to establish the American Tap Dance Foundation in New York to help preserve the history and promote the growth of tap dance. In the late 1990s, he also worked alongside Irving Berlin’s, Oscar Hammerstein’s, and Stephen Sondheim’s families in a group called AmSong. Together they worked to persuade Congress to pass the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, which granted 20-year copyright extensions on copyright terms in the United States. This legislation provided continued royalties to the families of some of the most successful songwriters of the last half of the 20th century. 

Today, Hoagy Bix still lives in New York where he continues to write about fly fishing. “My father reached people through music, and I’ve reached people through my writing.” Among his other current projects, Hoagy Bix is keeping busy by also working to produce a musical he expects to be on Broadway in the upcoming years called Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road which features twenty-three of Hoagy Carmichael’s songs. “Several theaters want to open our show, but [because of the COVID-19 pandemic] they don’t know when they’re opening yet,” he said, “but we’ll definitely be in the theaters in 2022.”

“In the world of music, my father was a genius,” Hoagy Bix said of his dad. The inescapable drive to excel in their chosen craft seems to be their Carmichael family trait. That same eagerness to work hard and succeed that Howard and Lida Carmichael once had can still be seen in their family today. Through dedication over time and the insistence to be the best at what they do, both Hoagy and Hoagy Bix have become celebrities among their peers, within each’s chosen artform – music for Hoagy, and fly-fishing rods and as an author for Hoagy Bix.  

To learn more about the life and legacy of Hoagy Carmichael, visit www.hoagy.com. To learn more about Hoagy Bix or to purchase a signed edition of one of his five books, visit his website at www.booksbycarmichael.com.

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