Nat King Cole

Nathaniel Adams Coles was born on March 17, 1919, in Montgomery, Alabama, one of several children of Edward Coles, a Baptist minister, and his wife Perlina, who played organ in her husband's church ^[1]. When Nathaniel was about four years old the family joined the Great Migration north and settled in Chicago, where his father took over the pulpit of a Baptist congregation on the South Side ^[2].

Music filled the household from the start. Perlina Coles gave her son his first keyboard lessons, and by the age of twelve he was playing organ and singing in his father's church ^[1]. Chicago in the late 1920s and 1930s offered a young pianist an extraordinary education outside the sanctuary as well. The teenager absorbed the playing of Earl Hines, the city's dominant jazz pianist, sometimes standing outside clubs he was too young to enter just to hear the band ^[2]. Hines's driving right hand lines became the foundation on which Cole built his own lighter, more fluid style.

While attending Wendell Phillips High School, and later DuSable High School under the noted band instructor Walter Dyett, Nathaniel formed his first groups, playing dances and small clubs around the South Side ^[3]. He dropped the final letter of his surname for professional purposes, and by his late teens Nat Cole was a working musician leading his own big band, the Rogues of Rhythm, alongside his older brother Eddie, a bassist ^[2].

Cole's route out of Chicago ran through the theater pit. In 1936 he joined a touring revival of the Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle musical Shuffle Along as pianist. When the production folded in Los Angeles the following year, he stayed on the West Coast, scraping together work in small clubs along Central Avenue and in Hollywood ^[2]. During this period he also married Nadine Robinson, a dancer from the show.

The decisive turn came in 1937, when a club owner on the Sunset Strip asked Cole to put together a small group. He recruited guitarist Oscar Moore and bassist Wesley Prince, and the drummerless combo became the King Cole Trio, the nickname a play on the nursery rhyme about Old King Cole ^[1]. The instrumentation was unusual for the era of big swing bands, and the trio's interplay of piano, electric guitar, and bass proved widely influential; pianists including Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum admirers later cited the format, and Cole's crisp single note solos shaped a generation of players ^[4].

At first Cole thought of himself strictly as a pianist who sang occasionally to satisfy audiences. That balance shifted after the trio signed with the newly founded Capitol Records in 1943. Their recording of "Straighten Up and Fly Right," a novelty tune Cole wrote drawing on one of his father's sermons, became a national hit in 1944 and sold in the hundreds of thousands ^[1]. Capitol's fortunes rose so sharply with Cole's sales over the following years that the label's circular Hollywood headquarters, completed in 1956, acquired the nickname "the house that Nat built" ^[5].

From the mid 1940s onward the hits arrived steadily. "The Christmas Song," recorded in 1946 with a string section added at Cole's insistence, became one of the most performed holiday recordings in American history ^[5]. "Nature Boy" spent weeks at the top of the charts in 1948, and "Mona Lisa," a ballad by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans that won the Academy Award for best original song, sold millions of copies in 1950 ^[1]. "Too Young" followed in 1951, and "Unforgettable," recorded the same year with an arrangement by Nelson Riddle, became his signature ^[4].

As the vocal hits multiplied, Cole gradually moved from behind the piano to the front of the stage, working with full orchestras and arrangers such as Riddle, Gordon Jenkins, and Billy May. Some jazz critics lamented the change, since Cole ranked among the finest pianists of his generation, but the transformation made him one of the best selling artists of the 1950s and a fixture of American popular song alongside Frank Sinatra, his Capitol labelmate ^[4].

Television provided another landmark. In November 1956 NBC launched The Nat King Cole Show, making him the first Black American to host his own network variety series ^[6]. Guests including Ella Fitzgerald, Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, and Peggy Lee appeared, many working for minimal fees to support the program. National sponsors nevertheless stayed away, wary of alienating Southern audiences, and the show ended in December 1957 after a little more than a year. Cole's much quoted verdict on the sponsors' timidity, that Madison Avenue was afraid of the dark, summed up the episode's bitter lesson about the industry ^[6].

Cole also acted in films, most notably portraying the blues composer W. C. Handy in the 1958 biographical picture St. Louis Blues, and he recorded successfully in Spanish for Latin American audiences, beginning with the album Cole Español in 1958 ^[1]. Any account of Nat King Cole achievements has to reckon with this range: instrumentalist, vocalist, television pioneer, and international star.

Cole's first marriage, to Nadine Robinson, ended in divorce in 1948. Days later he married Maria Hawkins Ellington, a singer who had performed with Duke Ellington's orchestra (the shared surname was a coincidence), in a ceremony at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church conducted by Adam Clayton Powell Jr. ^[2]. The couple raised five children, among them Natalie Cole, born in 1950, who became a Grammy winning singer in her own right ^[7].

Success did not shield the family from racism. When the Coles purchased a house in the all white Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1948, a property owners association tried to force them out, and the family endured threats and vandalism, including a slur burned into the lawn ^[2]. Cole refused to move. In April 1956 he was attacked on stage in Birmingham, Alabama, when a group of white men rushed him during a concert before a segregated audience; he was knocked from his piano bench and injured before police intervened ^[6].

Cole's response to such episodes drew criticism from some activists who wanted him to boycott segregated venues outright, and praise from others who noted his quieter contributions, including financial support for civil rights litigation and his refusal to perform for segregated audiences later in his career ^[6]. He was, by most accounts, a private and courteous man offstage, devoted to baseball, and a heavy cigarette smoker for most of his adult life, a habit he associated, wrongly, with preserving the husky texture of his voice ^[2].

The early 1960s brought no slackening of Cole's schedule. "Ramblin' Rose" reached the top of the sales charts in 1962, and "Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer" gave him another major hit in 1963, proof that he could still reach a broad audience amid the rise of rock and roll ^[1]. He toured internationally, played long engagements in Las Vegas, and mounted an ambitious touring revue called Sights and Sounds.

In late 1964, while filming the comedy western Cat Ballou, in which he performed as a singing narrator alongside Stubby Kaye, Cole's health failed. Doctors found a malignant tumor in his left lung, and he entered St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica in December 1964 ^[1]. Despite cobalt radiation treatment and surgery to remove the lung, the cancer had advanced too far. Nat King Cole died in Santa Monica, California, on February 15, 1965, a month before his forty sixth birthday ^[3]. Cat Ballou reached theaters that summer, giving audiences a final glimpse of him.

His funeral at St. James Episcopal Church in Los Angeles drew thousands of mourners, with honorary pallbearers that included Robert F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, and Count Basie ^[2]. He was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale.

By the time of his death Cole had recorded well over a hundred charting songs and sold tens of millions of records for Capitol ^[1]. The Recording Academy honored him with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1990, and he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000 as an early influence on the music that followed him ^[7]. The United States Postal Service placed his portrait on a commemorative stamp in 1994.

His afterlife in popular culture has been unusually vivid. In 1991 Natalie Cole recorded the album Unforgettable... with Love, singing her father's repertoire; its title track paired her voice with his original 1951 recording through studio technology, and the record won six Grammy Awards including album, record, and song of the year ^[7]. "The Christmas Song" returns to airwaves and charts every December, keeping his voice familiar to listeners born decades after his death.

For anyone asking who was Nat King Cole, the answer runs on two tracks. Musicians remember a pianist of rare touch and swing whose trio recordings remain studied models of small group jazz ^[4]. The wider public remembers a singer of uncommon warmth and clarity who carried American popular song around the world and who, with patience and considerable personal cost, opened doors in television and entertainment that had been closed to Black performers. Any Nat King Cole biography ultimately tells both stories at once, and the facts of his short life explain why his recordings have never left circulation.