Billy Stritch and Klea Blackhurst: Hoagy on My Mind

If you've heard "Stardust" – and how could you not, with it having been recorded more than 1,800 times – then you know Hoagy Carmichael's greatest legacy to popular song. But the lanky, laid-back Hoosier was no one-hit wonder. His catalog is dense with familiar standards – "Georgia on My Mind," "Heart and Soul," "Skylark," "The Nearness of You" – and dozens of lesser-known melodic gems, and Austin Cabaret Theatre is bringing back two stellar artists to unpack that musical treasure chest: Klea Blackhurst and Billy Stritch – she of the exquisite Ethel Merman tribute Everything the Traffic Will Allow; he the accompanist extraordinaire of Jim Caruso's Cast Party and an exceptional singer himself – will perform Dreaming of a Song: The Music of Hoagy Carmichael, the show that won them the 2009 Best Major Artist Award from the Manhattan Association of Cabarets & Clubs. In advance of their return, Stritch shared his thoughts on what makes Carmichael a memorable songwriter.

Austin Chronicle: He strikes me as one of those writers who, you'll hear one of his songs sometimes and go, "Oh, really, Hoagy Carmichael wrote that?"

Billy Stritch: Exactly. I think a lot of that had to do with the different lyricists he worked with, because, you know, writing with Johnny Mercer, you get a different kind of song than you do when you're writing with Harry Warren or somebody else like that. And he wrote with lots of different people. But it's not like you can hear a song and immediately know it was him. He wasn't pegged to one particular style. But a lot of people, when they think of Hoagy, they think of a Southern thing, because even though he was from Indiana, he wrote "Georgia on My Mind." He wrote "Ole Buttermilk Sky" and "Lazybones" and "[Up a] Lazy River" and a lot of the songs that we associate with the South and rural [life]. It's definitely not a big-city feel.

AC: I was wondering if he's the country mouse to George Gershwin's city mouse. Because even though he wrote with so many different lyricists, this country imagery shows up in lots of the lyrics. There's this sense that you're somewhere in the heartland, in this sort of Norman Rockwell landscape.

BS: What we say in our show is, Hoagy had never been to Georgia when he wrote "Georgia on My Mind," but if you told him where you were from, he'd be able to write a song that would conjure that feeling up. One of the threads that runs through his music is that ability to make you feel that it's on the front porch. It's a feeling of home, a feeling of simpler times and lazy summer days, you know.

AC: Your show's title is pulled from a "Stardust" lyric – "dreaming of a song" – and there is a dreamy quality to a number of his songs: "Stardust," "Lazy River" ....

BS: "Skylark" is another one. When I was growing up, my mom had a big stack of sheet music that she had back when she was a kid, and that was one of the songs in it, and I remember learning that song when I was really young. It's one of those melodies that just seems like it was always there, floating around. It's definitely got a dreamy quality. It's totally a 180 from what we were talking about before, Gershwin and Porter and those sophisticated Broadway melodies; it's the total opposite of that.

AC: As you developed the show, was there a quality to Hoagy's music that you discovered that you didn't expect?

BS: You know, his music is so sophisticated. Certainly "Stardust," this magical song that became the most recorded song in history – harmonically it's very, very sophisticated. He always said that he would sit at the piano to write and would play until this melody kind of came out of his hands. The melody always seemed to find him. I think what he was describing was this ability to channel music, that he was the instrument to bring some of these great tunes into our consciousness. He certainly took credit for the songs that he wrote, but he always said he was lucky because they seemed to just pour through him.

AC: When you're working out an approach to a really familiar song, do you decide you're going to do something with it, or do you just try to stay out of the way and let the song work its magic?

BS: In this particular show, we pretty much stay out of the way. Because I think the audience does want to hear the song served really well by the singers. I don't think they need me to do some radical new treatment of a song, especially the really well-known songs. The big ones, like "Georgia" and "Skylark" and "The Nearness of You," are done pretty straight. They're magic enough as they are. With "Stardust," it's kind of perfection. You can't improve upon perfection.

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Dreaming of a Song: The Music of Hoagy Carmichael will be performed Thursday & Friday, March 4 & 5, 8:30pm, in the Kodosky Lounge of the Long Center for the Performing Arts, 701 W. Riverside. For more information, call 453-2287 or visit www.austincabaret.org.