Before "Georgia on My Mind" became the official state song of Georgia, it was a song by Hoagy Carmichael and before Georgia was a state she was a woman or, rather, all women. Stuart Gorrell's lyrics are sung by a man for all men, who've loved and lost and who live only in the hopeless hope that they'll love again. But Carmichael's music yearns for more than a state, a woman or even all women; it longs for a state of mind, a place of the heart that is long gone beyond all hope of recall except through memory. Did Carmichael, while in New York playing with Paul Whiteman, the Dorsey Brothers, and the great Bix Beiderbecke yearn for his Indiana childhood or did he long for his college days in Bloomington or even his early years as a lawyer? Or did he yearn for something farther back than that, something primal, something essential, some paradise forever lost? His exquisite music surely does. His aching melody, with its parlando phrasing and its yearning major ninths and sevenths; his harmony, with its tonic majors turning to relative minors and its major subdominants turning to minor subdominants; and his subtly syncopated phrasing in the refrain and his gracefully chromatic modulation back from the bridge: Carmichael's music is nostalgia at its bittersweet best.

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