Nat King Cole died in 1965, still only 44 years old. That was the
same year I became totally blind. A visit back in time to those
tumultuous days give proof that here was a true Trail Blazing Pioneer
on the Front Line in the battle for Human Rights.
The following article was presented this morning(Sunday, March 17,
2019) on NPR.
Carl Jarvis
*******
Weekend Edition Sunday
TOM VITALE
Nat 'King' Cole having a smoke while disembarking from a plane in 1963.
Evening Standard/Getty Images
Born 100 years ago today,
Nat King Cole
was one of the most popular and influential entertainers of the 20th
century. As an African American ballad singer and jazz musician, he
topped the charts
year after year, sold more than 50 million records, pushed jazz piano
in a new direction and paved the way for later generations of
performers.
"Nat King Cole's voice is really one of the great gifts of nature,"
Daniel Mark Epstein, author of the 1999 biography Nat King Cole, says.
"Remember, he
was never trained as a singer. And so, his voice is absolutely pure.
He's a baritone with absolutely perfect pitch. He sings the notes true
and he hits
them right in the center."
Born Nathaniel Adams Coles in Montgomery, Ala., on March 17, 1919, the
child prodigy was later raised in Chicago. Cole's mother taught the
him to play
the piano when he was four, and at 15, he dropped out of high school
to lead his own bands. His first recordings show the influence of his
idol,
Earl Hines.
By the time he was 18, Cole was married, living in Los Angeles and
fronting a nightclub act with a name that riffed on a nursery rhyme —
the King Cole
Trio — featuring guitar, bass and piano, but not a lot of vocals.
The King Cole Trio had a huge influence, inspiring other jazz musicians like
Oscar Peterson
and
Ahmad Jamal
to form similar trios. Epstein says if Cole had never crooned a note,
he would still be an important figure in jazz.
Nat King Cole: An Incandescent Voice
50 GREAT VOICES
Nat King Cole: An Incandescent Voice
"He really is, I would say, one of our top five greatest and most
influential jazz pianists," Epstein says.
Johnny Mathis,
the 83-year-old balladeer who grew up listening to Cole as his
father's favorite singer in the 1940s, later met and became friends
with him after moving
to Beverly Hills in 1958.
"Nat King Cole was the God of popular music in our house," Mathis says
with a laugh. "That is the way that I fell in love with his music, is
through his
piano playing, then of course, I occasionally listened to him singing
— that wasn't too bad either."
The
Nat King Cole Trio
had one hit after another, and its leader became wildly popular. In
1946, the King Cole Trio landed a national radio show – the first of
its kind to be
hosted by an African-American musician. Soon, Cole began to play less
jazz and sing more ballads .
Nat King Cole plays with his jazz orchestra on the stage of The Apollo
Theater, in Harlem, N.Y. in the 1950s.
Eric Schwab/AFP/Getty Images
By the 1950s, Cole's repertoire was mostly love songs backed by
strings. He told a Swiss television reporter he was simply giving his
fans what they wanted.
"You see, it's not a case of my personal likes," Cole said in the
interview. "I try to please as many people as I possibly can and if I
find the people
like certain things, I try to give them what they like. And that's
good business too, you see."
According to Epstein, Cole saw himself as an entertainer, not an
activist. But his April 10, 1956 performance in Alabama was a crucial
moment in race relations.
"He went down to the South to perform with an interracial band, which
was pretty bold and offensive to a lot of whites," Eptein explains.
"But then he
agreed to play for segregated audiences, which offended his black audience."
Cole agreed to play a 10 p.m. show at the Birmingham Municipal
Auditorium for black audiences, and an early show for white audiences,
which attracted a
group of local white supremacists.
"The White Citizens Council of Alabama had this plot to kidnap Cole
from the theater, Eptein says. "The plot failed, but the hoodlums did
storm the stage,
break up the performance. They knocked Nat Cole off the piano bench
and injured his back."
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THE RECORD
'The Nat King Cole Show': From The Small Screen To Your Computer Screen, Finally
A doctor treated Cole in his dressing room, and the singer returned to
the stage for the late show. The incident made national news, and
seven months later,
Cole became the first major African-American musician to host a
national television variety show.
The Nat King Cole Show had a large audience, but no national sponsor
would back a show with a black host for fear of alienating Southern
viewers. NBC was
losing money, and Cole canceled the weekly program after a little more
than a year. However, Epstein says Cole continued to reach a wide
audience through
records that topped the charts. "That was the great gift of his
charisma," Epstein says. "That there was so much passion in his voice
and so much intelligence,
he was able to transcend the color barrier."
Cole didn't live long enough to see his career overshadowed by rock
and roll. A heavy smoker all his life, he was diagnosed with lung
cancer in 1964 and
went into the studio for the last time in June of that year. Only 45
years old, Cole died on Feb. 15, 1965.
"He was the nicest man you'd ever want to meet in your life," Mathis
recalls of his friend. "Just a very down-to-earth person who happened
to be one of
the greatest musicians of all time. And he became, of course, a model
for so many people, especially someone like myself."
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