Nat King Cole
Nathaniel Adams Coles, known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American singer, jazz pianist, and actor. Cole's career as a jazz and pop vocalist started in the late 1930s and spanned almost three decades where he found success and recorded over 100 songs that became hits on the pop charts.
Cole began his career as a jazz pianist in the late 1930s, when he formed the King Cole Trio, which became the top-selling group on Capitol Records in the 1940s. Cole's trio was the model for small jazz ensembles that followed. Starting in 1950, he transitioned to become a solo singer billed as Nat King Cole. Despite achieving mainstream success, Cole faced intense racial discrimination during his career. While not a major vocal public figure in the civil rights movement, Cole was a member of his local NAACP branch and participated in the 1963 March on Washington. He regularly performed for civil rights organizations. From 1956 to 1957, Cole hosted the NBC variety series The Nat King Cole Show, which became the first nationally broadcast television show hosted by a Black American.
Some of Cole's most notable singles include "Unforgettable", "Smile", "A Blossom Fell", "Nature Boy", "When I Fall in Love", "Let There Be Love", "Mona Lisa", "Autumn Leaves", "Stardust", "Straighten Up and Fly Right", "The Very Thought of You", "For Sentimental Reasons", "Embraceable You" and "Almost Like Being in Love". His 1960 Christmas album The Magic of Christmas, was the best-selling Christmas album released in the 1960s; and was ranked as one of the 40 essential Christmas albums by Rolling Stone. In 2022, Cole's recording of "The Christmas Song", broke the record for the longest journey to the top ten on the Billboard Hot 100, when it peaked at number nine, 62 years after it debuted on the chart; and was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry.
Cole received numerous accolades including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a Special Achievement Golden Globe Award. Posthumously, Cole has received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, along with the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award and has been inducted into the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame , Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame. NPR named him one of the 50 Great Voices. Cole was the father of singer Natalie Cole, who covered her father's songs in the 1991 album Unforgettable... with Love.
Early life
Nathaniel Adams Coles was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 17, 1919. He had three brothers: Eddie, Ike, and Freddy, and a half-sister, Joyce. Each of the Coles brothers pursued careers in music. When Cole was four years old, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where his father, Edward, became a Baptist minister. Cole learned to play the organ from his mother, Perlina Coles, the church organist. His first performance was "Yes! We Have No Bananas" at the age of four. Cole began formal piano lessons at the age of 12, learning jazz, gospel, and classical music "from Johann Sebastian Bach to Sergei Rachmaninoff". As a youth, Cole joined the news delivery boys' "Bud Billiken Club" band for The Chicago Defender.Cole and his family moved to the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, where Cole attended Wendell Phillips Academy High School, the school Sam Cooke attended a few years later. Cole participated in Walter Dyett's music program at DuSable High School. He would sneak out of the house to visit clubs, sitting outside to hear Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, and Jimmie Noone.
Career
Early career
When he was 15, Cole dropped out of high school to pursue a music career. After his brother Eddie, a bassist, came home from touring with Noble Sissle, they formed a sextet and recorded two singles for Decca in 1936 as Eddie Cole's Swingsters. They performed in a revival of the musical Shuffle Along. Nat Cole went on tour with the musical. In 1937, he married Nadine Robinson, who was a member of the cast. After the show ended in Los Angeles, Cole and Nadine settled there while he looked for work.One day in 1938, as he was relaxing in his hotel room, Bing Crosby heard the Nat Cole Trio for the first time from Jim Otto’s Steak House, and then took Johnny Mercer to hear them. Crosby soon had the trio on his Kraft Music Hall radio program, and Mercer would later sign them upon founding Capitol Records. In 1944, “Straighten Up and Fly Right” soared to the top of the charts.
With Crosby continually bringing them back on his program, the Trio even substituted for him in the summer of 1946.
Cole led a big band and found work playing piano in nightclubs. When a club owner asked him to form a band, Cole hired bassist Wesley Prince and guitarist Oscar Moore. They called themselves the King Cole Swingsters after the nursery rhyme in which "Old King Cole was a merry old soul". They changed their name to the King Cole Trio before making radio transcriptions and recording for small labels.
1940s
Cole recorded "Sweet Lorraine" in 1940, and it became his first hit. According to legend, his career as a vocalist started when a drunken bar patron demanded that Cole sing the song. Cole’s version was that one night a customer demanded that he sing, but because it was a song he did not know, he sang "Sweet Lorraine" instead. As people heard Cole's vocal talent, they requested more vocal songs, and he obliged.In 1941, the trio recorded "That Ain't Right" for Decca, followed the next year by "All for You" for Excelsior. They recorded "I'm Lost", a song written by Otis René, the owner of Excelsior.
Cole was the original house pianist for Jazz at the Philharmonic and performed at the first recorded concert in 1944. He was credited on Mercury as "Shorty Nadine", a derivative of his wife's name, because Cole had an exclusive contract with Capitol since signing with the label the year before. He used a variety of other pseudonyms for the same reason, including Eddie Laguna, Sam Schmaltz, Nature Boy and A Guy, "or whatever name for himself he could think of, but only as an instrumentalist, never as a vocalist." Cole recorded with Illinois Jacquet and Lester Young.
In 1946, the trio broadcast King Cole Trio Time, a 15-minute radio program. This was the first radio program to be hosted by a black musician. From 1946 to 1948, the trio recorded radio transcriptions for Capitol Records Transcription Service. They performed on the radio programs Swing Soiree, Old Gold, The Chesterfield Supper Club, Kraft Music Hall, and The Orson Welles Almanac.
Cole began recording and performing pop-oriented material in which he was often accompanied by a string orchestra. Cole's stature as a popular star was cemented by hits such as "All for You", "The Christmas Song", " Route 66", " For Sentimental Reasons", "There! I've Said It Again", "Nature Boy",
1950s
Cole continued his popular success without a break in the 1950s, recording "Frosty the Snowman", "Mona Lisa", "Orange Colored Sky", "Too Young".1951’s "Unforgettable" was made famous again in 1991 by Cole's daughter Natalie when modern recording technology was used to reunite father and daughter in a duet. The duet version rose to the top of the pop charts, almost forty years after its original popularity.
On June 7, 1953, Cole performed for the ninth Cavalcade of Jazz concert held at Wrigley Field in Chicago, which was produced annually by Leon Hefflin, Sr. Featured that day were Roy Brown and his Orchestra, Shorty Rogers, Earl Bostic, Don Tosti and His Mexican Jazzmen, and Louis Armstrong and his All Stars with Velma Middleton.
On November 5, 1956, The Nat 'King' Cole Show debuted on NBC. The variety program was one of the first hosted by an African American. The fifteen minute show was increased to a half-hour in July 1957. Rheingold Beer was a regional sponsor, but a national sponsor was never found. The show was in trouble financially despite efforts by NBC, Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, Frankie Laine, Peggy Lee, and Mel Tormé. Cole decided to end the program, and the last episode aired on December 17, 1957. Commenting on the lack of sponsorship, Cole said shortly after its demise: "Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark."
Throughout the 1950s, Cole continued to record hits that sold millions throughout the world, such as "Smile", "Pretend", "A Blossom Fell", and "If I May". His pop hits were collaborations with Nelson Riddle, Gordon Jenkins, and Ralph Carmichael. Riddle arranged several of Cole's 1950s albums, including Nat King Cole Sings for Two in Love, his first 10-inch LP. In 1955, "Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup" reached number 7 on the Billboard chart. Love Is the Thing went to number one in April 1957 and remained his only number one album.
File:Capitol Records Building LA.jpg|thumb|The Capitol Records Building, known as "The House That Nat Built" on Vine St.
As the taste in popular music continued to change in the 1950s, Cole's ballads appealed little to young listeners, despite a successful 1957 attempt at rock and roll with "Send for Me", which peaked at number 6 on the pop chart. Like Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennett, Cole found that the pop chart had been taken over by youth-oriented acts.
In 1958, Cole went to Havana, Cuba, to record Cole Español, an album sung entirely in Spanish. It was so popular in Latin America and the U.S. that it was followed by two more Spanish-language albums: A Mis Amigos and More Cole Español.
In 1959, Cole received a Grammy Award for Best Performance By a "Top 40" Artist for "Midnight Flyer".
Cole performed in many short films, sitcoms, and television shows, and appeared in big screen productions that included The Blue Gardenia, China Gate, and St. Louis Blues, where he played W. C. Handy.