Hoagy attended Indiana University from 1920-1926. His mother and grandmother encouraged him to study law as a more practical and reliable career than music. Hoagy obliged, but as a student at IU he put most of his time and energy into playing at dances, movie theatres, and other venues with his band Carmichael’s Collegians. Encouraged by the virtuoso cornetist Bix Beiderbeck, who first visited Bloomington in spring 1924 and became a close friend and important influence, Hoagy began to compose tunes. In May 1925, he and others recorded two of his songs, ”Washboard Blues” and “Boneyard Shuffle,” at the Gennett studio in Richmond, Indiana. Still, Hoagy kept to his legal studies, and after graduation in June 1926 he headed to Florida to practice law.
He found a job in the collections department of a Palm Beach law office, though he continued to play music gigs, including a ten-day cruise to Nassau and Havana, where he was excited by the rhumba music he heard there. When he failed the Florida bar exam he also lost his job, and 1927 found him back in Bloomington, once again living at his old fraternity house (Kappa Sigma), playing music and booking bands. He gave the law one more shot when he joined the firm of Bingham, Mendenhall & Bingham in Indianapolis, and he passed the Indiana bar exam in November 1927. By early 1929, however, he and the firm agreed that his destiny was not as a lawyer, and he was let go. Hoagy spent a few months in Los Angeles. Then in August of 1929 he traveled to New York City with the renowned Paul Whiteman orchestra (whose members included the crooner Bing Crosby). It was here in New York City over the next few years that Hoagy’s career as a composer and performer began to take off. He loved his student days at IU, but his musical extra-curricular activities, rather than his formal studies, were what prepared him for his life’s work.
]]>The Book Nook played a major role in Hoagy’s social life and musical career. A soda and sandwich shop popular among Indiana University students, the Book Nook was frequented by campus musicians who kept strict control over who was allowed to play the piano on site. When he was still in high school, Hoagy, who was already performing at local dances, began to spend time at the Book Nook as a “townie” outsider. One night he was invited to play the piano alongside Big Man on Campus Batty DeMarcus on saxophone. Hoagy’s performance won Batty’s approval, and he thereafter became an accepted member of the Book Nook inner circle. He became even more ensconced in the Book Nook community after he enrolled at IU in fall 1920. One influential friend of these years was William Moenkhaus. Moenkhaus had spent much of his childhood in Germany and Switzerland where he was exposed to the Dadaist art movement, with its rejection of bourgeois values and embrace of the absurd. Moenkhaus was a serious student of classical music and composition at IU, but outside of his formal studies he wrote whimsical, avant-garde pieces for The Vagabond campus magazine (under the pseudonym Wolfgang Beethoven Bunkhouse). He became the leader of a group of like-minded pranksters and rebels against conformity known as the Bent Eagles. Hot jazz, with its avant-garde, cross-racial overtones, fit in with Moenkhaus’s aesthetic, and Hoagy (a.k.a. Hogwash McCorkle) became a core member of the group, whose home base was the Book Nook. In June 1928, the Bent Eagles staged a Mock Graduation ceremony at the Book Nook, during which Hoagy was awarded a D.D. or "Doctor of Discord" degree. Hoagy, wearing a bathrobe and playing the cornet, participated in the “commencement” parade.
Hoagy spent many hours playing the Book Nook piano. According to legend, some of his first tunes were composed on it, including “Star Dust.” In his memoir Sometimes I Wonder, Hoagy claims that he was sitting on the “spooning wall” on the edge of campus one night in 1926, nursing a bruised heart after being jilted by Kathryn Moore, when the tune suddenly came to him. He ran to the Book Nook to work out the melody on the piano. Biographer Richard Sudhalter notes discrepancies in Hoagy’s and other people’s varying accounts of the composition and evolution of “Star Dust,” but he says that the Book Nook piano may well have been one of several Hoagy employed in developing his signature tune. When asked how to write a song, Hoagy said, “If you knew how to compose you wouldn’t be a composer. You don’t write the melodies. You find them. They lie there on the keys waiting for you. They have been there for centuries, and you are a composer or a writer if you know when you’ve found one.”Despite the importance of jazz for these noncomformists, Hoagy Carmichael and the other musicians playing at the Book Nook were playing for an all-white audience. Like most establishments of the time, it was racially segregated and did not permit Black customers. It would remain segregated until 1947, when Black IU student and football player George Taliaferro integrated the restaurant. ]]>Robert Harris’s Princess Theatre opened on June 23, 1913, with the photoplay Mlle. Coquette accompanied by a six piece orchestra. The program also featured chimes playing Ethelbert Nevin’s “The Rosary.” As the first built-from-the-ground-up-movie theatre in Bloomington, it featured a 400-seat auditorium which sloped in a semi-circle to the screen. During these early days the Princess was the only theatre to feature Edison Talking Pictures, the original “talkies,” along with popular silent films. In his autobiography Sometimes I Wonder, Hoagy described how his mother Lida helped supplement his father’s income by playing piano in the local movie theatres including the Princess, the Indiana, and the Wonderland. His mother, he said, “was dreamy, musical, and could rattle the eighty-eight keys of a piano with a speed and expertise that showed she wasn’t fooling. She accompanied the flickering celluloid epics of the day, busting out in fragments of Wagner for train wrecks and fires, bringing in the sobbing notes for Way Down East and giving the Indian Love Call its most cloying chords whenever the plot hinted of outdoor men enmeshed in turn-of-the-century sex.” When vaudeville acts, French girlie shows, and tramp comics came to play at town theatres, Lida Carmichael played accompaniment, knocking out the zoom, zam, boffs, and socks on the theatre piano. Hoagy reminisced that, because she played picture-show music, he was admitted free and considered himself the most important kid in town. Renovations to the Princess 1923-Present An enlarged and remodeled Princess Theatre reopened in 1923. The new theatre doubled the size of the auditorium and began featuring Indiana University jazz orchestras that performed in the evenings. A variety of notable musicians, including Hoagy Carmichael, headed those orchestras. In 1929, sound systems for Vitaphone and Movietone were installed and the Princess became a “talkie” theatre. The stock market crash and depression closed many theatres throughout the country, but the Princess remained open. The façade of the theatre was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. The front half of the auditorium and stage walls collapsed in 1985. This area was razed and condominiums and commercial storeroom facilities were constructed in their place. The area that once contained the foyer and lobby has been renovated throughout the years for use as a variety of restaurants and was most recently home to a restaurant called the Village Pub.
]]>In his unpublished memoir Jazzbanders, Hoagy said of his hometown, “Bloomington offered everything. Creeks, ponds, rabbits, circuses and wide open spaces. I could cross a dusty street here in my bare feet without the aid of a traffic cop.” The Carmichaels lived close to the IU campus. As a boy Hoagy played baseball in the summer and football in autumn on Dunn Meadow.
According to his account (as reported in Sudhalter’s Stardust Melody), Hoagy's breakthrough as a pianist came one rainy summer day. He was home in the family parlor after his baseball game on Dunn Meadow had been cancelled. The sound of the bells in the IU clock tower playing “Hail to Old I.U.” struck his ears. Suddenly he began to pick out the tune on his mother’s piano. Although he had heard his mother play all of his young life, this was the first time it occurred to him to try playing it himself. His mother had not wanted to impose her interest on the boy. However, when she discovered his own passion and aptitude for the instrument she was thrilled and began teaching him the keyboard. From this point on, Hoagy’s love of music grew apace. The rained-out baseball game on Dunn Meadow proved to be a blessing in disguise!
]]>The house on Dunn Street is one of several homes where the Carmichael family lived during Hoagy’s childhood. Born in Bloomington on November 22, 1899, Howard Hoagland was the first child and only son of Howard Clyde (“Cyclone”) and Mary Lida Robison Carmichael. Three girls were to follow. The youngest of them, Joanne, died when she was three, much to her brother’s distress. He blamed her death on the family’s poverty and wrote on the back of a photo of her that her loss made him vow, “I would never be broke again in my lifetime.”
Cyclone Carmichael held a number of jobs, none of which seemed to last long or pay well. He periodically uprooted the family in pursuit of better opportunities. In 1904 they moved to Indianapolis but were back in Bloomington two years later. A more dramatic move came in 1910 when Cyclone transported the family to Missoula, Montana. It was a vast, cold, and sparsely populated area that ten-year-old Hoagy found bleak and forbidding. As his eldest son Hoagy Bix later recounted, however, the boy discovered that Black musicians played hot ragtime on pianos in local brothels. Hoagy would steal there to listen to them, without his mother’s knowledge. By spring 1911, much to Hoagy’s relief, his father’s Montana dream had ended. The family was back in Bloomington, first at the Dunn Street house again and then at 325 South Fess Avenue, just two blocks away.
Hoagy’s mother Lida was a skilled pianist. She supplemented the family income by playing at silent movie theaters as well as fraternity and sorority parties on the IU campus, frequently accompanied by her son. Hoagy didn’t reveal a special interest in music, however, until he was eleven years old. He claims he became fascinated with the song “Little Boy Blue” and asked his mother to teach him to sing it. She later taught him to play the piano as well. Their mutual love of music became a lifelong bond between Hoagy and Lida.
In 1916 Cyclone Carmichael once again moved the family to Indianapolis. This disrupted the social and musical life Hoagy, now in high school, had begun to enjoy. He dropped out of Manual High School in Indianapolis when he was sixteen. He then worked a series of jobs on a construction crew, assembly line, and, most grimly, in a slaughterhouse. In early 1919, at the age of eighteen, Hoagy returned to Bloomington. He lived with his Robison grandparents at 907 Atwater St., and re-entered high school, from which he finally graduated in 1920.
]]>One of the four original diagonal streets of the 1821 plan for Indianapolis, Indiana Avenue tells an important part of the story of African American life in Indianapolis, much of which was centered here on the near northwest side of the downtown area. In 1860, the African American population of Indianapolis numbered only 498, but just forty years later it reached more than 15,000, with the center of the African American community already firmly entrenched in and around Indiana Avenue. While the Indiana Avenue that we see now consists mainly of commercial, housing, and university related buildings, this street contained some of the most prominent jazz clubs of the mid-1900s.
The Beginnings of Indiana Avenue
Originally swampy land that was believed to be unhealthy because of its location near the Central Canal and the White River, the Indiana Avenue area went largely undeveloped until the nineteenth century when it began to evolve into an industrial center populated by mostly by white residents. Then, beginning in the 1860s following the Civil War, African Americans migrating north into Indianapolis and facing segregation settled on this stretch of land. Before long, a thriving African American community developed, due in part to the area's geographic isolation.
Businesses along the avenue, particularly the 400 and 500 blocks, provided food, housing, entertainment, consumer services and, most importantly, a sense of community for African American residents of the city. Some businesses were run by European immigrants but interspersed among those were African American owned businesses. By the late 19th and early 20th century, more and more African American business owners, residents, and consumers frequented Indiana Avenue. Because segregation and prevailing negative attitudes towards African Americans defined this era, the residents of Indiana Avenue had to become self-sufficient and provide for their basic needs. The Indiana Avenue of the 1920s provided goods and services for African Americans not admitted to downtown stores.
The office of the Indianapolis Recorder was also located along the 500 block of Indiana Avenue from 1920-1975. Established in 1895, the Recorder is the third oldest black newspaper in the United States. Residential areas like Ransom Place were nearby and helped foster a neighborhood atmosphere. People could walk to their destinations and such foot traffic helped to add to the liveliness of the area. Ransom Place was also home to several prominent local black professionals such as doctors, attorneys, and politicians.
Jazz on Indiana Avenue
Perhaps the most influential and dominant aspect of life on Indiana Avenue for the first half of the twentieth century was its lively nightlife and music scene. When jazz began to emerge in 1915 as a popular musical form, rooted in African American culture, Indiana Avenue stood poised to play a major role. Many of the jazz bands from Chicago and New York that flooded the radio strongly influenced local jazz bands of the Midwest.
The 1930s not only brought with it the end of prohibition, but a great increase in dancing and nightclub life. At the time, Indianapolis’ only clubs were spaces open only to whites. However, clubs for African Americans soon began to open up near and on Indiana Avenue. Helped along by brothers Denver and Sea Ferguson, who owned several clubs and a booking agency, Indiana Avenue, also known as “The Avenue”, hosted national names like Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie, and cultivated local talent like Noble Sissie, Errol Grandy, Wes Montgomery, and Jimmy Coe. As a result, Indiana Avenue grew into one of the premier music scenes, rivaling other larger cities like Chicago and Kansas City. The cultural identity created by segregation led to the Harlem Renaissance atmosphere of the area.
In 1931, Sea Ferguson opened up the Trianon Ballroom on 244 West Vermont St. The Recorder called it the finest ballroom in Indiana. The ballroom featured jazz orchestras such as Spaulding’s Brown Buddies, Zack Whyte, and Bernie Young. By 1940, there were over 25 clubs on Indiana Avenue and, it became a stop for many African American acts. Musicians like Freddie Hubbard and J.J. Johnson (among others) made Indianapolis a regular stop and developed a derivation of jazz known as “Indy Sound.” Numerous jazz clubs planted roots in the area, including The Cotton Club, George’s Bar, Henri’s Cafe Lounge, Dee’s Paradise Ballroom and probably the most well-known, Sunset Terrace.
Located at 511-513, George’s Bar regularly supplied late-night jazz enthusiasts with jam sessions. Hosting such acts as Les (Count) Fisher—nicknamed by mentor Count Basie—and soon-to-be jazz greats like Freddie Hubbard, George’s consistently brought in both Midwestern black and white audiences. Local bands like guitarist Wes Montgomery and his brothers often kept patrons of all ethnicities enthralled at George’s.
The Civil Rights Era through Today
The jazz clubs on Indiana Avenue were some of the few places that had a racially mixed crowd at this time. This integration caused controversy, and some saw the clubs as an inappropriate environment for whites. After a couple of club raids, there was an increase in police presence and violence that created a bad reputation for the club scene. By the 1950s, the clubs had not disappeared but dispersed to areas outlying Indiana Avenue.
As the Civil Rights Movement progressed, expanding job opportunities and housing availability pulled and pushed residents from the Avenue, and its jazz scene vanished. While the Walker Theatre continues to anchor the district’s entertainment scene, it primarily performs formal large-scale productions.
Many have aimed to keep the memory Indiana Avenue jazz alive. For instance, “Jammin’ on the Avenue,” a sculpture created by John Spaulding in 1989, stands on Indiana Avenue at the south entrance of Lockefield Gardens, commemorating the scene that used to be. An Indiana Historical Bureau historic marker also resides at the intersection of Indiana Avenue and Martin Luther King, Jr. Street to commemorate the site’s history.
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