Nat King Cole meant to be a jazz pianist until a bar customer demanded a song
In the late 1930s Nat Cole led a piano trio in Los Angeles clubs. The story goes that one night a patron insisted he sing, and Cole, not knowing the requested tune, offered Sweet Lorraine instead. It became his first hit in 1940, and that voice went on to carry more than 100 pop chart singles.
Born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1919, he moved to Chicago at four when his father became a Baptist minister, and learned organ from his mother, the church organist. Formal piano lessons at 12 covered jazz, gospel and classical repertoire, and as a teenager he would slip out to sit outside clubs where Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines were playing. He left school at 15, toured with a revival of the musical Shuffle Along, and settled in Los Angeles when the show ended there.
His trio took its name from the nursery rhyme about Old King Cole. Bing Crosby heard them from his hotel room in 1938 and brought Johnny Mercer, who later signed them to his new Capitol Records, where they became the label's top-selling group of the 1940s and its only Black act. Straighten Up and Fly Right topped the charts in 1944. Bound by an exclusive Capitol contract, Cole played piano for other labels under invented names such as Shorty Nadine and Sam Schmaltz. His 1946 show King Cole Trio Time was the first radio program hosted by a Black musician.
From 1950 he worked as a solo singer, with hits including Mona Lisa, Too Young and Unforgettable. His NBC variety show, launched in November 1956, made him the first Black American to host a network television show seen nationwide, but it never found a national sponsor despite guests like Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett, and ended in December 1957. He also recorded a full album in Spanish in Havana in 1958, and marched on Washington in 1963 despite rarely speaking out publicly on civil rights.
Cole died in 1965 at 45. In 1991 his daughter Natalie used studio technology to sing Unforgettable as a duet with him, and it reached the top of the pop charts. In 2022 his Christmas Song reached ninth place on the Billboard Hot 100, 62 years after first charting.
Source: Nat King Cole
