Dreaming of a Song Kindle Edition
by Rob Eddy (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
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Hoagy Carmichael, composer of his century’s most recorded song, Stardust, stands under the massive atrium dome of the West Baden Springs Resort Hotel, remembering... He recalls jazz alligators and slit-skirted flappers leaning close to the ballroom stage to hear every note of Bix Beiderbecke’s incredible 32-bar cornet improvisations. Though he couldn’t read music, Bix was mythologized for his lyricism and gifted tone, “like a girl saying Yes,” even before his early death by bottle.

D.C. Stephenson is an Indianapolis coal businessman with a secret identity, the Grand Dragon of the Northern Realm of the Ku Klux Klan. He realizes the political power to be wielded if his Secret Order could be domesticated, and so conceives of a ladies auxiliary, the Ladies of the Golden Mask, who distribute Christmas baskets to the poor and feed thousands at his summer evening patriotism rallies. The elaborate parties he throws with jazz band entertainment, including Bix’s own rag-tag Wolverine Orchestra, provide him prey of young women to drug. Both he and his organization’s brutality peak on the eve of the 1924 elections.

Margaret Stellar is the daughter of a wealthy piano maker and recording studio owner, whose mother is Queen Klady in the Golden Mask. Margaret can identify any piano model by ear from twenty paces, and her wit often wilts Hoagy and Bix. She struggles to understand the enigmatic Bix, afloat and unkempt, but in whose improvisations she hears the influence of Ravel and Stravinsky. She, Hoagy and Bix are drawn into the violence and political swirl in a way that changes their lives and perhaps the course of American music. As the story resolves at West Baden’s renovation reception, a gift from Margaret relieves the melody haunting Hoagy’s reverie for fifty-one years.
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