Nat King Cole Biography

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Nat King Cole
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Nat "King Cole" was a bridge in the field of racial relations, even though he died while major strife was happening. Born in Alabama in 1919, he died of cancer in 1965 but in his 45 years brought immense talent and artistry to music. That he was chastised by more radical civil rights activists was unfortunate, even as he was preparing to mount a production of James Baldwin's "Amen Corner" and showing a growing interest in radical black literature. He had suffered the ignominy of being barred from white hotels, met ridicule when he bought a house in fashionable and white Beverly Hills and quit a national television show as the first black host when producers would not find a national sponsor. As an entertainer, Cole played a prominent role. His family - his father was a Baptist Church pastor and mother was a choir director in church - moved from Montgomery, Alabama to Chicago in the '20s during the mass exodus of blacks from the south into what they hoped were better times in northern industrial cities. He learned piano from his mother starting at age four and by twelve was studying classical piano. Chicago was a hotbed of jazz in the '20s and '30s and Cole came under its spell, getting his first professional job playing in a revival of the successful black Broadway play "Shuffle Along." When the play folded in California, Cole began sitting in and finding work in clubs in Los Angeles. He formed his first trio in 1939 with guitarist Oscar Moore and bassist Wesley Prince, leaving out drums and fashioning a listenable jazz sound that was to be his trademark for years. About this time, a club owner was to put a paper crown on his head and call him "Old King Cole." The name stuck. His first record came in 1944 with his own "Straighten Up and Fly Right" and during the next twenty years, he sold some 50 million records and became a singer on par with the other leaders of the era, including Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Bing Crosby. He had not pursued a singing career and it is said that a somewhat inebriated bar patron once prevailed on him to sing "Sweet Lorraine," the result so impressing the audience that he began adding vocals to the trio's repertoire, including "Straighten Up...," which he had heard in one of his father's sermons earlier in life. Cole won a contract with the new company, Capitol Records, and his early successes in record sales with the company helped seal its future as a leader in the music industry. The trio was to give out in favor of the eventual solo vocal career, and Cole began his life as a pop singer. He was to have several No. 1 hits before 1955 and between 1955-64 had 26 hits on the Top 40 chart. Going from ballads to more uptempo songs, Cole continued to please his record-buying public. But even though he is known mostly as a singer, he was a jazz pianist of great stature before vocals became his life and certainly could have been a major figure in the jazz world of bebop in the '40s and '50s. He also became an actor in occasional films, this culminating in his 1958 portrayal of W.C. Handy in "St. Louis Blues." His records also included work with George Shearing, Stan Kenton, the Count Basie Band and others even though his major fame was in the lush ballads. Cole did not live to see his daughter Natalie become a big singing star but his voice came to be heard on her 1991 hit song, "Unforgettable," as she sang over his version of the song recorded a generation before.

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