For me, Nat King Cole is the most listenable singer of all time. I've always considered his to be the closest thing to a perfect singing voice that I've ever heard. I'm not alone in that assessment. With his string of international hits in the 1950s and 60s, songs such as Mona Lisa, Nature Boy, (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66, and Unforgettable, the whole world voted by their purchases to affirm Nat's greatness. And although he died of cancer in 1965, Nat King Cole remains a household name today. Yet there are a number of interesting facts about Nat's life that most people are unaware of. Here are some of them: Nat's real name was Nathaniel Adams Coles. So, "Nat King Cole" was not just a nickname, but an apt stage name he deliberately chose as a play on his birth name. …show more content…
He was the son of a Baptist minister in Montgomery, Alabama, and his mother, the choir director in his father's church, began teaching him to play the piano at the age of four. By the time he turned 15, Nat was so good he left school to become a professional jazz pianist. In 1939 he formed the King Cole Trio, a jazz ensemble with Nat starring as the mostly non-singing piano player. But in 1946 he turned one of his father's sermons into a major hit, Straighten Up and Fly Right. Nat's vocal on that recording launched him into the spotlight as a singer. Nat introduced The Christmas Song (“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”) in 1946 with the King Cole Trio. But later that year he fought to have strings added to the arrangement and re-recorded it. That version became a huge hit. He recorded that arrangement twice more, the last of those recordings, made in 1961, being done in stereo. That version is the one now heard almost continuously during the Christmas season every