REMEMBERING STARDUST [M, 8-11-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—REMEMBERING STARDUST [M, 8-11-25]

 

I’m having trouble with stardust. No, not because I might be stardust before long. I think that would be neat. I mean the song, “Stardust.”

It should be easy. In fact, I have known those words in the past. But if I don’t keep singing them regularly, I forget. No, not the words. I know all the words. I just don’t know where they go in the song.

It’s like “The Old Rugged Cross.” I was doing a memorial service in a funeral home. No problem, because the organist was my church organist, and we knew how to work together, even when things went sideways. [My late great friend, Bob Butts, was from Mississippi and didn’t like it when people said that things “went south,” so…]

Yes, Beth and I could get out of jams in worship, but the family had asked for a soloist from another church. Still, okay. We knew her. Lynne was a nice woman. A good singer. She knew the assigned hymn well, had sung it at many funerals, so she didn’t use a hymnal. And she got one line out of place.

The problem with Old Rugged Cross” is: Any of the lines in “Old Rugged Cross” will fit with any of the others. There is no narrative progression that tells you what should go where.

Lynne sang and sang, experimenting with one line after another, trying to find her way back in. It went on and on. I thought about mouthing words to her, but by that time, I had no idea what line went with what other lines myself. Beth’s arms were drooping, so I gave her our signal, and she did those things organists do to say that the thing is going to be over. Then one long last amen. Lynne looked very relieved.

Songs and poems don’t have to be narrative. Stories do. But that makes non-narrative songs hard to remember. Which verse comes next?

Which brings us back to “Stardust.”

I sing as I walk. On Fridays, I sing a song for each place we have lived. I can’t go home until I’ve done the whole repertoire. I use “Indiana, Our Indiana” for my days as a student at IU. I use “On the Banks of the Wabash/Back Home Again, in Indiana” for when we lived in Terre Haute, since Paul Dresser was a Terre Haute boy.

That leaves me with “Stardust” for Bloomington.

Hoagy Carmichael was the quintessential Bloomington/IU boy. “Stardust” is the quintessential Bloomington melody. [1] But Mitchell Parish was a New York boy, a lyricist for Tin Pan Alley. [2] His lyrics are wonderful. They fit “Stardust.” They fit so well that most people assume Hoagy wrote the melody and lyrics at the same time, even though the melody preceded the lyrics by years, and Hoagy was only a composer, not a lyricist. But Parish’s lyrics aren’t narrative!

Narrative songs and story songs are not necessarily the same. Story songs, like Tom T. Hall’s “The Year that Clayton Delaney Died” is exactly what it says—it tells a story. A narrative song doesn’t automatically tell a story, but it has a beginning and a middle and an end, like “Love Letters in the Sand,” or “Moments to Remember.” It makes narrative sense if you’re trying to remember it.

I’ve always had a good memory. I enjoy learning and reciting poems like Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” I guess I’ll just have to bite the bullet. “So now the purple haze of twilight time…”

John Robert McFarland

1] I’ll never forgive Willie Nelson for doing a concert in the IU Auditorium--with the statue of Hoagy Carmichael right beside his bus--and not doing “Stardust,” which was such a hit for him. Bob and Julie Hammel got very good tickets to Willie’s concert as a welcome “back to Bloomington” gift for us, and Willie didn’t sing any Hoagy songs. You know how Jesus talked about the unforgivable sin?

2] Journalist Monroe Rosenfeld named it that because all the music publishers were bunched together in NYC in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Every office had a string of composers auditioning their newest tries on out-of-tune upright pianos all day long. Rosenfeld said it sounded like beating tin pans together.