Greatest Hits Of Nat King Cole
Jupiter Fuerst
20 Golden Greats is a greatest hits album by Nat King Cole. It was released by Capitol Records in 1978 and reached number one on the UK Albums Chart,[1] where it was a posthumous number one.
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.
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.
"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."
"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."
"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."
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."
After getting his start playing in high school dance bands Cole went to California with a revue, "Shuffle Along," that went broke in Long Beach in 1937. After the revue folded, Cole said he "played piano in almost every beer joint from San Diego to Bakersfield" until he got a job for a jazz quartet at the Swanee in Hollywood.
A personal friend and White House guest of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Cole was outspoken on racial issues. He bemoaned an age that accepted black entertainers as "no threat to anybody," while black doctors, lawyers and educators were denied similar recognition.
nat king cole was a wonderful singer, always calm and peaceful sounding. the songs he sang were big hits and well deserved. . he recorded some of the biggest hits in history. god bless him in the world of the truth