When Nat Cole was a teenager in Chicago, he couldn’t always afford to get into the clubs where the great jazz pianists played. So he found another way in. His first wife, Nadine, recalled that he would slip around to the alley behind the venue and listen through the wall.
The pianist he was listening to was Earl Hines.
Cole stood in that alley night after night, absorbing every run and figure he could hear through the bricks. Eventually he worked up the nerve to go inside, introduce himself, and ask Hines if he could sit in. Hines said yes. In his early playing, Nadine remembered, Cole sounded unmistakably like Hines. Then, gradually, something else emerged. As she put it simply: “He developed his own style.”
That arc — the shy kid in the alley who becomes something entirely new—is the story of Nat King Cole in miniature. It survives in one of several oral histories gathered in the 1980s by screenwriter Ernest Tidyman and his wife, Chris Clark-Tidyman, who were researching a television biopic of Cole’s life. Those recordings are among the materials now held in the Ernest Tidyman papers at the American Heritage Center. This post draws on four of them—interviews with Cole’s first wife Nadine, his older sister Evelyn “Bay” Coles, his road manager Baldwin “Sparky” Taveres (also spelled Tavaros), and the songwriter Bobby Troup—each offering Cole’s story in the words of someone who shared it with him.
A Shy Guy
Nathaniel Adams Coles was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1919. His family moved to Chicago when he was still a boy, where his father, Reverend Edward Coles, led a Baptist congregation and his mother Perlina was the church organist. The music was not taught — it arrived. Nadine was clear that Cole did not study in any conventional sense; he simply played, picking out two-handed melodies by ear from the age of four or five.
His sister Bay described a household that was big and always full of people — but the boy at its center was, in private, strikingly self-contained:
“The echo that people saw on stage or as a performer was a totally different type of person, because he was very shy. He was very bashful and shy. And very low key, very quiet in general. The loudest thing about him was his laugh. Because when he laughed, he just let it all go.”
— Evelyn “Bay” Coles, Nat’s older sister
In the late 1930s, Nat even wrote a song about it, called “I’m Just a Shy Guy.” Nadine recalled it with a quiet laugh — completely overlooked, she said, lost in the noise around “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” But it was true.
Bay’s childhood memories have the texture of something lived rather than recalled for posterity. She remembered what happened whenever Nat spotted her coming down the street while he was with his friends:
“I would see him, maybe he’d have a piece of candy or ice cream, and he’d be with his friend, and he’d hand it to his friend, if he see me coming, so he could say it was his friend’s.”
—Bay Coles
He told his mother: “One day my name will be up in lights.” By fifteen he was performing professionally. At seventeen he left home as pianist and band director for Shuffle Along, a traveling musical revue, where he met Nadine, a dancer in the show. They married on the road — twice, as it turned out, the first ceremony in Ypsilanti, Michigan hasty enough that they held a proper one in Ann Arbor shortly after. When the show folded in California, Nat and Nadine were stranded.
Source: Newspapers.com.
The Trio
Stranded in Los Angeles, Cole formed a piano-guitar-bass trio and began working small clubs. The origin of the group carries an irony that Taveres enjoyed recounting. Asked how the Nat King Cole Trio came to exist, he had a one-line answer:
“Lee Young is the reason for the Nat King Cole Trio. He didn’t show up for work that night.”
— Sparky Taveres, road manager
Lee Young—drummer, brother of saxophonist Lester Young, and a close friend of Cole’s—was supposed to be in the band the night the trio format was born. Cole went on without him. Nadine described what the trio sounded like once it found its footing: after six or eight months together, she said, the three musicians sounded like one. Taveres added that during those years, Cole never played the same song twice in the same night.
Henry Miller, who joined the talent agency General Artists Corporation in 1943 and was assigned to Cole’s account, remembered the moment “Straighten Up and Fly Right” broke through: the trio was earning $225 a week for all three men combined, playing a 90-seat cocktail lounge, and suddenly “people lined up all around the block to get in this club every night.” The manager Carlos Gastel signed Cole to personal management and made a deal with Capitol Records. Cole moved through the sudden fame with a steadiness that Miller never forgot: “He was so calm and so cool. Always just like he was when he was making $225 a week.”
The Night Route 66 Almost Didn’t Happen
Among the songs most closely identified with Cole is “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” written by Bobby Troup. Troup described the night he played it for Cole at the Trocadero on Sunset Boulevard — having finished writing it on the drive west after his discharge from the Marines:
“I got up, and the bandstand was on a riser, and the counter bench was kind of close to the edge of the riser. And I got up and sat down, and the legs of the piano went over the riser, and I fell over backwards.”
— Bobby Troup, songwriter
Cole, watching a man fall off the back of a piano riser, was not immediately impressed. But Troup played on. When he got to “Route 66,” Cole’s demeanor changed. He said he’d record it. Troup—who had almost no money—went out and bought a house on three mortgages. Capitol pushed “Route 66” ahead of twenty other ready releases. Years later, Cole sat down with Troup after a show and said:
“With Mona Lisa, with Nature Boy, and all the things that I’ve done and the popularity that they’ve enjoyed — I’d like you to know that the song I am most identified with of all my songs is your song, Route 66.”
— Nat King Cole, as recounted by Bobby Troup
Troup also offered a musician’s view of what made Cole technically extraordinary: most pianists, when they sing, drop back to simple chord support. Cole didn’t. He ran full melodic figures with his hands while his voice carried the song — in two worlds at once. “I’ve never heard anyone do it as beautifully as he did.”
The Road
Fame did not insulate Cole from the realities of race in America. It was Taveres’s job to travel ahead of the show and clear a path. He was not a man who absorbed the indignities quietly:
“The worst cities in the world, believe it or not, were always in the north. New York, Philadelphia, Detroit — and you run into them, and they are the worst bastards. But I always had something to tell a clerk. I’d give them a fit after the manager would tell them to give me the room.”
— Sparky Taveres
In Las Vegas, the opening engagements came with their own theater of humiliation. At the Thunderbird Hotel, where Cole was the headliner, he had to enter through the back door. Management set up a lavish buffet in the dressing room. Taveres remembered it clearly: they didn’t touch it. “We wouldn’t even touch it, drop it. Nothing in there.” When a hotel boss later came backstage wanting Cole to dedicate a song to a friend, offering $10,000, Taveres’s answer was immediate: “I don’t tell you how to run a casino. Don’t you tell me how to run my stage.”
Cole’s approach to the broader fight was characteristically his own. Miller described him as someone who pushed at barriers without raising his voice: “He was just determined to help break it down without being a rabble rouser about it.” Cole bought a house in the all-white Hancock Park neighborhood in Los Angeles; when neighbors objected to “undesirables,” he replied, “Neither do I, and if I see any, I’ll be the first to complain.”
Source: Newspapers.com.
Cole was the first Black performer to play a Southern tour with an integrated company, including Ted Heath’s band from England. In April 1956, in Birmingham—the city of his birth—men rushed the stage and assaulted him mid-performance. When the NAACP pressed him to become a public spokesman, Cole’s response, as Bay recalled it word for word, was:
“I will not join you in speaking because I am not an orator. I am a performer and I will join you in the way I can.”
— Nat King Cole, as recalled by Bay Coles
The Stage
Onstage, the private, self-contained man Bay knew became someone else entirely. She described the moment the lights came up:
“When you walk out on that stage you just had a little, call it a sneaky smile … and lit up a stage. He never came off panting … He enjoyed what he was doing. In fact, he felt safer out there than he did anywhere.”
—Bay Coles
That safety was earned. Bay was unambiguous about the standards he held: “Out there he was so much fun, but he was more serious about his work out there than he was anything else. Don’t play with him on that stage. Don’t miss a cue.” Cole never considered himself a singer. Taveres put it plainly: “You could compliment him on the piano playing, and you’d get a bigger smile out of him than you would if you said he was a singer.”
There was one evening in Philadelphia that illustrated this. A young woman in the audience told Cole that if he played more piano, he’d be the biggest thing in her world. Cole laughed so hard he could barely respond. At the next show, he played three piano tunes in the second half, looking down at her table the whole time. She sent him flowers the next day.
Cole explained the demise of his NBC television variety show, which ran for 64 episodes in 1956–57 with guests including Harry Belafonte, Ella Fitzgerald, and Bing Crosby, with characteristic economy: “Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark.” Miller, who traveled with him to Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, recalled Cole’s response when a Korean orchestra played completely out of tune the night before a concert. Cole turned to him and said: “Henry, three days from now we won’t even be worrying about it, will we?”
The Final Years
The relentlessness of Cole’s schedule was something Taveres had watched with alarm for years. In his final months, that alarm became something else. Taveres described Cole staying up until six or seven in the morning in Las Vegas, reviving himself with the steam room before the evening’s shows, while a local doctor dismissed his declining health as exhaustion.
Cole eventually flew to San Francisco for a proper examination. The x-ray found a tumor. By January 1965, surgeons had removed his left lung. It was too late.
In those final weeks, something had shifted between Cole and the man who’d been at his side for over a decade:
“Just the last two weeks before they took him to the hospital for the cancer, he wouldn’t allow anybody to touch him but me.”
— Sparky Taveres
Nat King Cole died on February 15, 1965. He was 45. He was eulogized by Jack Benny. His hits—“Route 66,” “Mona Lisa,” “The Christmas Song,” “Unforgettable”—have never left the air.
Miller, who spent decades working with hundreds of artists, offered a verdict with the weight of a long career behind it: “Very rarely do you find somebody that calm. He was sort of like a quiet giant.” The boy who stood in a Chicago alley listening to Earl Hines through a wall became one of the most recognizable voices of the twentieth century. He did it by being, in Nadine’s quiet phrase, something entirely his own.
The Ernest Tidyman papers at the American Heritage Center hold an extensive collection of materials gathered by Tidyman and his wife — among them oral histories with a range of people who knew Cole personally and professionally. Ill health prevented the project’s completion. But the interviews survived, and with them candid, first-hand accounts of Cole’s life and career from the people who shared it with him.
By AHC Writer Kathyrn Billington and AHC Archivist Leslie Waggener.
