Carmichael's "Ole Buttermilk Sky" of 1946, was an Academy Award nominee for an "Oscar" in the following year of March 1947, with the eponymous theme song from the Western film Canyon Passage (1946), starring Dana Andrews, Brian Donlevy, Susan Hayward and Ward Bond, in which he co-starred as a ukulele and guitar-playing balladeer musician and prospector-miner riding a mule.

[3][4] Howard worked as a horse-drawn taxi driver and later as an electrician, while Lida, a versatile pianist, played musical accompaniment at local nickelodeons and silent movie theaters and private parties to earn extra income.

With the exception of some piano lessons in nearby Indianapolis with Reginald DuValle (1893-1953), a bandleader, pianist and accordion-player, known later as "the elder statesman of Indiana jazz" and billed as "the Rhythm King", Carmichael had no other academic or professional musical training.

At 18, Carmichael helped supplement his family's meager income by doing manual jobs in building construction, or at a bicycle chain factory, and in a meat slaughterhouse.

This bleak time was partially relieved by piano duets with his mother and by his long friendship with local musician-bandleader DuValle, who taught him piano-jazz improvisation.

[9] Carmichael earned $5 playing at a college fraternity dance at nearby Indiana University in 1918, marking the beginning of his professional musical career.

[10] The death of Carmichael's three-year-old younger sister in 1918 (possibly from the world-wide infamous Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1923) affected him deeply.

He was a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity, and played the piano around Indiana and Ohio with his recently organized band, "Carmichael's Collegians".

While he was living in New York City (1929–1936), he wrote songs that were intended to stand alone, independent of any other production, such as a theatrical performance or a motion picture.

As a singer-pianist, Carmichael was adept at selling his songs to lyricists, music publishers, film producers, and promoting them to the public via microphones on stage and in mass media.

)[29] "Stardust" attracted little attention until 1930, when Isham Jones and his orchestra recorded it as a sentimental ballad with a slower tempo, the re-timing often credited to the band's arranger, Victor Young.

[26][30] Its idiosyncratic melody in medium tempo–a song about a song–later became a standard of the Great American Songbook, recorded by hundreds of artists, including Artie Shaw, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson, and Wynton Marsalis.

[37] In New York, Carmichael met Duke Ellington's agent and sheet music publisher, Irving Mills, and hired him to set up recording dates.

Carmichael's first major song with his own lyrics was "Rockin' Chair," recorded by Louis Armstrong and Mildred Bailey, and eventually with his own hand-picked studio band (featuring Beiderbecke, Bubber Miley, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Bud Freeman, Eddie Lang, Joe Venuti, and Gene Krupa) on May 21, 1930.

Fortunately, Louis Armstrong had recorded "Rockin' Chair" at Okeh studios in 1929, giving Carmichael a badly needed financial and career boost.

Big band swing was just around the corner, and jazz soon turned in another direction with new bandleaders, such as Benny Goodman, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, and new singers, such as Bing Crosby, leading the way.

In 1935 Carmichael left Southern Music Company and began composing songs for a division of Warner Brothers, establishing his connection with Hollywood.

[42] Following his marriage to Ruth Mary Meinardi, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, on March 14, 1936, the couple moved to California, where Carmichael hoped to find more work in the film industry.

Since then many others have recorded the song, including Glenn Miller, Dinah Shore, Helen Forrest (with Harry James),[58] Aretha Franklin and Bette Midler.

In the multi-Academy Award-winning film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) with Dana Andrews, Myrna Loy and Fredric March, Carmichael's character teaches a disabled veteran with metal prostheses to play "Chopsticks," and also performs "Lazy River.

"[61] Carmichael played Hi Linnett in Canyon Passage (1946), a Universal Pictures western that starred Dana Andrews (his costar in The Best Years of Our Lives and Night Song), Susan Hayward, and Brian Donlevy.

[55][66] He was also a regular cast member in the first season of NBC's western TV series Laramie (1959–63), playing the character role of Jonesy the ranch hand.

[67] The Johnny Appleseed Suite, Carmichael's second classical work for orchestra, suffered the same ill fate as his earlier attempt, Brown County Autumn.

The suite received little notice and only limited success,[55] but Carmichael remained financially secure due to the royalties from his past hits.

Carmichael took up other interests in retirement, including golf, coin collecting, and enjoying his two homes, one on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and the other in Rancho Mirage, California.

"[80] He spent his final years at home in Rancho Mirage, near Palm Springs, California, where he continued to play golf and remained an avid coin collector.

[84][85][86][87] Carmichael is considered to be among the most successful of the Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the 1930s, and he was among the first singer-songwriters in the age of mass media to exploit new communication technologies, such as television and the use of electronic microphones and sound recordings.

His creative work includes several hundred compositions, some of them enduring classics, as well as numerous sound recordings and appearances on radio and television and in motion pictures.

[90] Carmichael's greatest strength was as a melodist,[55] but he also became known as an "experimental" and "innovative" songwriter, whose "catchy, often jazz-infused, melodies" and "nostalgic, down-home lyrics"[51] were memorable and had wide public appeal, especially with mass media promotion and through the efforts of numerous entertainers who performed his songs.

[100] Carmichael also appeared as a Stone Age version of himself in The Flintstones, in which he sings "The Yabba Dabba Doo Song," written by Barney, and based on an idea from Fred.