The timeless tower that was Nat "King" Cole
Feb. '90 tribute on the 25th anniversary of his death
The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return
- "Nature Boy," sung by Nat King Cole, 1948
It's voice that doesn't cut through the air as much as it floats above it. It's the sound of things coming together, of hearts beating like soft bongos, of orange leaves swirling in autumn wind. It's as strong as your uncle's hand, yet as soft as the spot in his heart for you. The music of Nat King Cole is more than just a collection of songs; it's a soundtrack for a time and place far away, yet right inside every one of us.
Though Cole died of lung cancer at age 45 on Feb. 15, 1965, his inimitable voice has remained in the public consciousness. He's influenced such singers as Johnny Mathis, Sam Cooke and Aaron Neville, but there is no substitute for Cole's velvet vibrato. He was also a brilliant jazz pianist, influencing Oscar Peterson, among others, with his late 1930’s/early ‘40s trio work.
Offstage, Cole was as classy a human being as he was a song stylist. As the first black artist to cross over to the pop charts and to have his own network TV show, he was under constant scrutiny from racist detractors, yet he never faltered as a role model. As his widow, Maria Cole, remembers, "He was a humble man, a man of simple pleasures. He loved people and people loved him."
On the 25th anniversary of his death, Cole will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the upcoming (Feb. 21, 1990) Grammy Awards. The honor coincides with the release of a wonderful Cole entry in The Capitol Collectors Series. The CD-only disc chronologically highlights Cole's 23-year involvement with Capitol, from "Straighten Up and Fly Right" (his first hit with the King Cole Trio in '44) through his early-'50s glory years, when he recorded such million-sellers as "Unforgettable," "Mona Lisa" and "Too Young," to his last bona-fide hit, "Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer." Though Frank Sinatra is credited with pioneering the concept album when he recorded Songs for Young Lovers with lush arrangements by Nelson Riddle in late 1953, Cole beat him to the idea 10 months earlier with Songs for Two in Love.
As Nathaniel Coles, (his christened name), growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he'd sit outside the Grand Terrace club and listen to the sounds of jazz greats like Earl Hines and Fats Waller seep outside. Though he sang in the choir of the True Light Baptist Church, where his father was pastor and mother was choir director, it wasn't singing but piano playing that was his obsession. As a student at Wendell Phillips High School, Cole grew as a musician in a program that also turned out future jazz greats Milt Hinton, Ray Nance and Herbie Hancock, as well as singers Sam Cooke, Dinah Washington and LaVern Baker.
At night, Nat and his older brother Eddie played the South Side nightlife circuit with the Rogues of Rhythm. Nat wanted to sing with the Rogues as well as play piano, but after vocalizing once at practice, the other members told him he wasn't good enough. That snub kept Cole from singing into a microphone again for several years.
At 17, Cole joined a revue called Shuffle Along, and moved to Los Angeles with the rest of the troupe when its Chicago engagement ended. He fell in love with one of the singers, Nadine Robinson of East St. Louis, and the two teenagers were married.
In L.A., Nat Cole picked up session work, playing on Frankie Laine records before forming his first trio, Nat Cole's Swingsters, in 1936, with Austin-born Oscar Moore on guitar and Wesley Prince on bass. The group was originally a quartet, but drummer Lee Young left to join a more current big band. The most popular groups at that time numbered at least eight players; a jazz combo of just piano, bass and guitar was virtually unheard of. Most clubowners refused to even let the trio audition, saying, "You can't even fill the stage," but Bob Lewis liked what he heard and hired them to play his Swanee Inn in Hollywood. It was after one especially great show there, with Nat's racing fingers chopping the crowd into bits, that Lewis dubbed him "King" Cole. He drove the point home the next night by setting a red crown on Cole's head.
Though the newly named King Cole Trio was primarily an instrumental group, legend has it that Cole's singing career began one night when a drunk patron kept requesting that he sing "Sweet Lorraine." Cole finally sang it to shut him up. Cole's widow, Maria, who lived at the Boston Ritz-Carlton in 1990, said that wasn't exactly how it happened. "Nat told me, `It sounded like a good story, so I let it ride,' " she said. Nat had been singing two or three songs per set, and when he saw that they were going over best, he started singing more. It's not the soda fountain at Schwab's, but it's the truth.
One of the first acts signed to the new Capitol label in 1942 was the King Cole Trio, who previously had only moderate success with a slew of singles on such labels as Decca, Ammor, Excelsior and Premier. The trio's first Capitol single was "Straighten Up and Fly Right," a song inspired by one of Cole's father's sermons. Needing rent money fast, Cole sold a piece of the composer credit to song publisher Irving Mills, which ended up diverting a lot of royalties when the 1944 release was a big hit for Cole, and an even bigger hit the next year for the Andrews Sisters.
The King Cole Trio's first million-seller came in '46 with a song pitched to them by its writers, Mel Torme and Bob Wells. Cole read the charts and liked the song, but didn't think it would work with just a trio. "Why not put a string section in back of the trio?" Cole's manager Carlos Gastel suggested. "The Christmas Song" became a classic and demonstrated to Cole that the world was ready for his singing lush ballads. Though jazz aficionados would eventually label him as a pop sellout, he had found his style. And he would return to jazz with his exceptional 1957 LP After Midnight.
While still married to Nadine, Cole met his future wife, Maria Ellington, in '46, while both were singing at the Club Zanzibar in New York. He soon divorced Nadine. While honeymooning in Mexico, Cole received word that "Nature Boy," written for him by a street person named eden ahbez (who believed that only divinities deserved capital letters) had reached No. 1 on the charts. After a week of searching all over L.A. to tell ahbez that his song was a big hit, Cole's road manager Mort Ruby finally found him in his sleeping bag under one of the "Ls" in the "HOLLYWOOD" sign.
As Cole became a singing sensation, selling millions of records and earning up to $10,000 a performance on the road, the issue of his race sometimes took priority over the music. Some of the biggest stars of the day, including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr. and Harry Belafonte appeared for almost no money on Cole's NBC-TV show to help their friend out. But The Nat King Cole Show failed to attract a major sponsor and was canceled in December, 1957, after 64 weeks. "Madison Avenue," Cole summed up, "is afraid of the dark."
A more harrowing episode of racism occurred on April 10, 1956, at a "whites only" concert in Birmingham, Ala. (In the South, it was customary in those days for acts to perform an early show for whites and a late show for blacks.) After his second song, Cole was set upon by six members of the White Citizens Council, who didn't approve of Cole's integrated band. Before the local police could restore order, the singer was punched in the face and repeatedly kicked. The biggest blow came the next day when Cole was chastised by Thurgood Marshall, then executive secretary of the NAACP and (later a Supreme Court justice), who said Cole was an Uncle Tom "lacking only a banjo" because he performed before segregated audiences. Cole, who had broken the color line in Las Vegas by demanding to stay in the hotel in which he was performing, was especially hurt by the insult.
But racial incidents were nothing new to him. Soon after Nat and Maria were married, they bought a house in the ultra-ritzy, all-white section of L.A.'s Hancock Park. Before the Coles moved in, their real estate agent received death threats; neighbors protested outside the Tudor-styled home for which Cole had just paid $85,000, a princely sum in those days. Even though they referred to him as "King Colored," Cole met the local "Welcome Wagon" and was told, "We just don't want undesirables in the neighborhood." He shot back, "I don't want any undesirables, either, and I'll be the first to complain if I see any."
The Coles stayed in Hancock Park, though the IRS threatened to seize the home in '51 for $140,000 in back taxes. Like many black artists of the time, the road to fame was a bumpy one for Cole, who paid cash for everything, didn't keep receipts and received bad financial guidance. Even as IRS agents descended on the house and confiscated everything of value except the grand piano (which was too big to remove), Cole refused to be bitter and admitted that he was guilty. "Just give me time to pay the money," he said. "Don't take my house." Eventually, Capitol advanced royalties to help pay off the debt.
The ensuing decade in Los Angeles was a happy time for the Coles. Nat was to the Dodgers what Jack Nicholson is today to the the Lakers - a superfan who never missed a home game and always sat behind the team. Maria gave up her singing career ("zero regrets," she says) and gave birth to four children - Natalie (who later became a hit singer in her own right), Kelly, and the twins, Timolin and Casey. (To acknowledge his birth on St. Patrick's Day, 1919, Nat gave his children Irish names.) The Coles later adopted Carol, the child orphaned after Maria's sister's death.
Carol Cole received quite a thrill at her debutante ball in '61 when President Kennedy stopped by. Earlier in the evening, Cole had attended a dinner honoring the president and when he explained that he had to leave early for the ball, Kennedy called over his Secret Service men and went with Cole. "I just want to return the favor of the great Nat King Cole coming to my dinner," Kennedy told a society reporter.
"Nat and I were almost complete opposites; he was a very patient, very tolerant and generous to a fault, and I was very assertive," Maria recalled. "But that's why we went so well together. He had a calming effect on me and I got things done for him." Before he married Maria, Cole evenly split proceeds from the trio’s gigs with his guitarist and bassist. But she convinced the star of the group to treat his sidemen as employees, and put them on salary. A wounded Oscar Moore, who won best guitarist in the annual Downbeat poll from 1945-47, quit the Cole Trio. His career never really recovered.
Younger brother Ike Cole, reached by phone at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz., painted a humble picture of perhaps the greatest balladeer of all time: "I remember once when I was pretty young and some of my friends were all excited when they found out that I was Nat King Cole's brother. Until then, I didn't even know he was famous. He sure didn't act famous when he'd come home. He was always the same ol' guy."
To Nat Cole, fame wasn't the thing, nor was money. It was music that filled his heart and harmony that ruled his disposition. He recorded the definitive versions of so many classics like "Stardust," "There Will Never Be Another You," "A Blossom Fell" and "When Sunny Gets Blue," because like Frank Sinatra, he sang each lyric as if it were written especially for him.
Sometimes it was. As Sammy Davis Jr. said, almost 25 years ago to the day, "When Nat had a big hit, other singers paid him a particular compliment; they didn't rush out and copy it. I've heard singers, including myself, say, `Forget it. Nat's done it already.' "
Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times
Great piece. “When Sunny Gets Blue” is one of my all-time favorites. I still play it regularly. And then there’s this:
https://open.spotify.com/track/3NpvutIvtoV2RFpomdRJrg?si=02CC2M5rSbyGtl95MLlx3Q&context=spotify%3Asearch%3Athere%25E2%2580%2599s%2520a%2520train%2520out%2520f