My Unforgettable Christmas with Nat King Cole

Hello and Welcome to our Nat King Cole tribute / section of our project 365 Daily Dose of Vinyl.  Albums featured today include: Christmas with Nat King Cole, You’re My Everything, Unforgettable and Nature Boy. Which one is your fav? They are all hits, jazz, Christmas for one, keepers.

wiki:Nathaniel Adams Coles (March 17, 1919 – February 15, 1965), known professionally as Nat King Cole, was a musician who first came to prominence as a leading jazz pianist. He owes most of his popular musical fame to his soft baritone voice, which he used to perform inbig band and jazz genres. He was one of the first black Americans to host a television variety show, and has maintained worldwide popularity since his death.

Unforgettable is a popular song written by Irving Gordon. The song’s original working title was Uncomparable. The music publishing company asked Irving to change it to Unforgettable. The song was published in 1951. The most popular version of the song was recorded by Nat King Cole in 1951, with an arrangement written by Nelson Riddle. A non-orchestrated version of the song recorded in 1952 is featured as a bonus track on the CD reissue of 1955’s completely instrumental (save the bonus material) Penthouse Serenade. Cole recorded the tune anew in 1961, in a stereo version of the Riddle arrangement, for the album The Nat King Cole Story. His version of the song was included in its entirety in the 2009 filmWatchmen during the Comedian’s death scene.  In 1991, after Elvis Presley‘s legendary musical director Joe Guercio had the idea, Cole’s 1961 recording of the song was edited and remixed to create a duet with his daughter, Natalie, which won three awards at the Grammy Awards of 1992: Song of the Year, Record of the Year and Best Traditional Pop Vocal Performance.    Nat Cole’s original recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000.

His stature as a popular icon was cemented during this period by hits such as “The Christmas Song” (Cole recorded that tune four times: on June 14, 1946, as a pure Trio recording, on August 19, 1946, with an added string section, on August 24, 1953, and in 1961 for the double album The Nat King Cole Story; this final version, recorded in stereo, is the one most often heard today), “Nature Boy” (1948), “Mona Lisa” (1950), “Too Young” (the #1 song in 1951), and his signature tune “Unforgettable” (1951) (Gainer 1). While this shift to pop music led some jazz critics and fans to accuse Cole of selling out, he never totally abandoned his jazz roots; as late as 1956, for instance, he recorded an all-jazz album After Midnight. Cole had one of his last big hits in 1963, two years before his death, with the classic “Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer”, which reached #6 on the Pop chart.

In August 1948, Cole purchased a house from Col. Harry Gantz, the former husband of Lois Weber, in the all-white Hancock Parkneighborhood of Los Angeles. The Ku Klux Klan, still active in Los Angeles well into the 1950s, responded by placing a burning cross on his front lawn. Members of the property-owners association told Cole they did not want any undesirables moving in. Cole retorted, “Neither do I. And if I see anybody undesirable coming in here, I’ll be the first to complain.