Nat King Cole would have been 106 years old today. Born in Montgomery, Alabama on March 17, 1919, his mother was a church organist and taught him to play all kinds of music, “jazz, gospel, and classical from Johann Sebastian Bach to Sergei Rachmaninoff”.
From the late 1930s, Nat King Cole was known as a jazz pianist, one of the best of his generation, wth his own King Cole Trio, the model for many other small jazz ensembles. Cole was the original house pianist for Jazz at the Philharmonic and performed at the first recorded concert in 1944.
Nobody knew he could sing. But in the early 1950s, he became a singer. The story goes that his career as a vocalist started when a drunken bar patron demanded that Cole sing the song, Sweet Lorraine. “I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.”
But despite his popularity as both singer and jazz player, as a prominent black performer he was frequently attacked by other black artists for, initially, agreeing to play for segregated audiences in the South. Deeply hurt by the criticism in the black press, he became much more visible and, until his death in 1965, Cole was an active participant in the civil rights movement, playing an important role in planning the March on Washington in 1963.
From 1956 to 1957, Cole hosted the NBC variety series The Nat King Cole Show, which became the first nationally broadcast television show hosted by a black American.
Nat King Cole died on February 15, 1965, at the age of 45.
Here he is, Nat King Cole performing “Unforgettable” from the August 6, 1957 episode of The Nat King Cole Show.
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