Afraid of the Dark: The Forgotten Legacy of Nat King Cole

Afraid of the Dark: The Forgotten Legacy of Nat King Cole
by Mark Anthony Neal

The name Nat King Cole usually draws a reference to his famous daughter Natalie, who after launching her career in the mid-1970s as the heir-apparent to Aretha Franklin—a career threatened by drug addiction—later re-booted her career twenty years ago, with her cover of her father’s song “Unforgettable.” Many others might remember Cole for his signature Christmas carol “The Christmas Song” which is as synonymous with the holiday as is Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” But when Cole died forty-six years ago, Ebony Magazine described Cole as “the most celebrated Negro to die in world history.”

Nat King Cole’s career and legacy has been recalled with the recent release of four episodes of the groundbreaking Nat King Cole Show on iTunes, which plans to release 30 of the original 64 episodes of the show. The first national television show hosted by an African-American, the Nat King Cole Show ran from 1956-1957.

Though the show had a solid audience, it was never able to attract national sponsorship. With the post-Montgomery Civil Rights movement still in its embryonic stages, many national advertisers were fearful of backlash from Southern audiences. Indeed as one White station manager in the south admitted to Ebony Magazine in 1965, “they told me that if [Cole] came back on they would bomb my house and station.” Perhaps even more interesting than the reasons why the Nat King Cole Show was canceled after its year-and-a-half run, is Cole’s ascent to a status that allowed him to have a show in the first place.

Born Nathaniel Adams Coles in 1919, Cole was raised in Chicago in a religious household. Cole’s father was a preacher and the father and son regularly butted heads as the younger Coles was more attracted to the sounds coming from the Jazz clubs than the music he heard on Sunday mornings. Cole found a balance by playing the organ in his father’s church.

An accomplished pianist, Cole was influenced by the music of pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines, and by his teenage years was fronting a band with his brother Eddie. After high school he headed out west with a traveling show, Shuffle Along, a musical which featured the music of the Black songwriting team Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. The show closed in Long Beach when a stage hand ran off with the gate receipts, but Cole stayed out west working the chitlin circuit—LA’s Central Avenue—with his trio The King Cole trio (dropping the s from his name).

Though the band played instrumentals, as legend goes, one night a patron demanded that somebody sing “Sweet Lorraine.” Cole reluctantly complied and his a career as a vocalist was born. Signing a contract with Capitol Records in 1943 (the same label his daughter Natalie would later sign with in 1974), Cole’s first big hit was “Straighten Up and Fly Right” a song he wrote as a teenager after hearing one of his father’s sermons.

With songs like “Route 66,” “Mona Lisa,” and “Nature Boy,” Cole was one of the country’s most popular balladeers in the 1940s and 1950s, rivaled only by his label-mate, Frank Sinatra. But whereas Sinatra could imagine a future that was limitless—movies, the biggest and most lucrative venues, headlining in Vegas—Cole would always be challenged by the realities of race.

These challenges were as personal as they were professional; when Cole and his family moved into an exclusive Los Angeles neighborhood, racist signs were often left on their lawn. When a neighbor complained about not wanting undesirables in the neighborhood, Cole famously replied “neither do I, and if I see anybody undesirable coming into this neighborhood, I’ll be the first to complain.”

Though Cole was a lifetime member of the NAACP and in the years before his death performed benefits for Civil Rights organizations, some Blacks were critical of him for his willingness to perform in the South in front of segregated audiences. Cole often remarked—like Michael Jordan would decades later—that those audiences in the South were also fans of his music.

No doubt Cole believed that his willingness to perform in front of Southern audiences would help humanize Blacks to those audiences. Such was not the case when Cole was attacked on stage in 1956 while performing in Birmingham, AL, in what was later revealed as a (terrorist) plot by one-hundred and fifty men to kidnap Cole.

Yet publically Cole remained the very definition of cool and restraint becoming the epitome of crossover Blackness for the generation just prior to the watershed moments of the Civil Rights Movement. Standing six feet tall, dark-skinned, and with a deep baritone voice (think a better singing Brian McKnight), Cole would have been a major sex symbol had he emerged 30 years later. Indeed one could imagine that Cole was many of the Black male role models that Barack Obama studied to find his own pitch as the most well known living Black man in the contemporary world.

A chain-smoker (Phillip Morris was his cigarette of choice), Cole kept many of the professional and personal sleights directed towards him, to himself. When he suffered an ulcer in 1953 that led to doctors to remove half of his stomach, it was clear that the pressures of crossing over were taking a significant toll on him. It is part of the reason he took the lack of advertising support of his show in stride, though he was clear-eyed when he suggested that “the ad agencies are afraid of the dark.” He was prescient, when he told Ebony Magazine in 1959, “I realize what TV is doing. I know they are freezing the Negro out.”

Ironically Nat King Cole, was midway through a thee-year, $ one million dollar contract with the Sands hotel in Las Vegas, when he was diagnosed with the lung cancer that he would succumb to at the young age of forty-five. Cole died two months after Sam Cooke (his professional heir apparent) and six days before Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik el Shabazz) was murdered in Harlem. The stature of both Cooke and Malcolm X increased exponentially after their deaths, as Nat King Cole seems the forgotten man. Cole was content working from the inside, so its not surprising that his legacy doesn’t shine as bright forty-six years after his death.

Nevertheless, Cole was a model for Motown founder Berry Gordy as he sought to break the label’s flagship acts on the supper club circuit. Marvin Gaye, for example, recorded a tribute album to Cole for Motown, nine months after his death, beginning what would be a career like fixation with recording a classic pop balladeer recording that Cole did in his prime. The Vulnerable Sessions, released after Gaye’s death was the product of that labor.

Thanks to iTunes, audiences can now see one of the great Black crossover stars at his peak—a man who in so many ways set the pace for the Michael Jacksons, Oprah Winfreys and Lebron James that would emerge after his death.

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Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press). He is the host of the weekly webcast, Left of Black, produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Black Music Month '09: The Legacy of Jerry Butler’s Songwriter’s Workshop

BLACK MUSIC MONTH 2009

Chicago Soul Connection:
The Legacy of Jerry Butler’s Songwriters Workshop
by Mark Anthony Neal

Pop music history is filled with examples of singers who first honed their songwriting skills and offered those skills to more established acts, before making a name for themselves singing their own material. Most famously, Carole King was a staple at the famed Brill Building in New York City churning out pop confections with partner Gerry Goffin for the likes of The Shirelles, Little Eva, and Aretha Franklin, whose version of King and Goffin’s “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman” remains a Soul standard. After a decade behind the scenes, King stepped forward in the early 1970s with Writer (1970) and then Tapestry (1971), the latter which established King as one of the definitive singer-songwriters of the era. No less a famous example can be found in the case of Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, who toiled at Motown for nearly a decade creating classics like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “You’re All I Need to Get By” before becoming major stars in their own right in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Contemporarily, there’s the case of Shaffer Chimere Smith, who offered his compositions to Marques Houston, Mario (“Let Me Love You”) and Christina Milian, before stepping out front as Ne-Yo. Singers need songs, and no one understood that better than the legendary song stylist Jerry Butler, when he created the Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop in Chicago in the early 1970s. Though few remember it Butler’s workshop would have an impact on Soul music throughout the 1970s eventually figuring in the rise of Natalie Cole as the first real challenge to Aretha Franklin’s status as the “Queen of Soul”

Jerry Butler began his professional singing career in the late 1950s as the initial lead singer for The Impressions. Butler was 18-years-old when the Chicago based group topped the pop charts with “For Your Precious Love” in 1958. Among those in the group was a 16-year-old songwriter and guitarist by the name of Curtis Mayfield, later to become one of the most recognizable singer-songwriters of his generation. Though Butler was with the group for only a short time, he and Mayfield forged a productive professional relationship that led to Butler’s success recording as a solo artist in the early 1960s. Recording with with the black-owned Vee-Jay Records with the Butler/Mayfield collaboration produced hits like “Need to Belong” and “He Will Break Your Heart.”

Butler also had access to the remnants of Tin Pan Alley—the cadre of New York based songwriters and producers that were at the heart of American popular music in the early 20th century—in this case, the aforementioned Brill Building where Butler scored hits recording tracks by Brill Building residents like Hal David and Burt Bacharach (“Make It Easy On Yourself”).



When Butler signed with Mercury Records in 1966 and was again in need of strong material, he turned to two young and unproven songwriters and producers named Leon Huff and Kenny Gamble. Butler’s work with Gamble and Huff coincides with the most productive and popular period of the Soul singer’s career with a string of hits including the ballad “Never Gonna Give You Up” (later covered by Isaac Hayes on Black Moses), “Hey Western Union Man” and “Only the Strong Survive,” which became Butler’s first Gold single and gave an early inkling of the uplift music that Gamble and Huff would become known for in the 1970s. Recalling his work with Gamble and Huff, which produced the legendary The Ice Man Cometh recording, Butler writes in his autobiography Only the Strong Survive: Memoirs of a Soul Survivor,

Huff would be on the piano , while Kenny and I would come up with lyrics. Huff and Kenny would come up with concepts and play some chords, and I started singing. That’s how we came up with ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.

When Mercury Records balked at Gamble and Huff’s efforts to get a greater percentage of the profits from their production efforts with Butler, the relationship was dissolved in late 1969, though Butler would record two albums with the duo for Philadelphia International Records a decade later. Having worked with songwriters and producers like Gamble and Huff and Curtis Mayfield before them—folk who literally defined the sound of Soul music for more than a decade—Butler’s career was at a crossroads. Butler writes in Only the Strong Survive, “

I was in a terrible dilemma. Should I risk my professional reputation recording substandard material? Or should I use what I had learned over the years to lay the groundwork for developing songwriters who would supply me—and others—with quality songs for a life time. I chose the latter.

Thus the Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop was founded in Chicago in January of 1970. A year later, the workshop became a joint venture with the Chappell music publishing company which made an initial investment of $55,000 for the project.

The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop did little to revive Butler’s career—though his second Gold single “Ain’t Understanding Mellow” with Brenda Lee Eager was a product of the workshop. By 1972 though, the workshop had generated $4 million in records sales and produced about 30 chart singles recorded by the likes of The Dells, Isaac Hayes, Aretha Franklin, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Betty Everette. Despite its modest success, the real story of the Jerry Butler Songwriter’s Workshop wasn’t what it produced, but the talent that came through its doors and went on to greater success. Workshop veterans include Terry Callier, who with fellow workshop participant Larry Wade, worked on The Dells' Freedom Means (1972) recording which produced their classic “The Love We Had (Stays on My Mind)” as well as Callier’s own brilliant Cadet recordings Occasional Rain (1972) and What Color is Love? (1973)—both produced by Charles Stepney, architect of the early Earth, Wind and Fire sound. Other veterans of the workshop were Len Ron Hanks and Zane Grey who wrote L.T.D.’s breakthrough hit “(Every Time I Turn Around) Back in Love Again”(1977) and later scored their own Disco hit “Dancin’” (1978) recording as Grey and Hanks.

The most successful veterans of The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop were the duo of Chuck Jackson and Marvin Yancy. Jackson, the brother of the Reverend Jessie Jackson, was an art director at Playboy Magazine when he joined Butler’s workshop. Yancy, was the musical director and pianist at his father’s Chicago Church when he met Jackson at Reverend Jackson’s Black Expo in 1971. The two made a musical connection and the initial fruits of their collaboration was the formation of the group The Independents which featured Jackson, Yancy (who preferred staying in the background) Helen Curry, Maurice Jackson (no relation), and later Eric Thomas, who was a member of Reverend Jackson’s Operation PUSH Choir. Recording with dual leads Curry and Chick Jackson, in the spirit of the deep Soul recordings of the Soul Children, The Independents produced a series of soulful, moody and gospel inflected mid-tempo and ballad numbers including “Leaving Me,” which sold over a million copies in 1973, “Baby I Been Missing You,” “The First Time We Met,” “In the Valley of My World” (later sampled on Jay Z’s remix of “Allure”) and the stirring “Let This Be a Lesson to You.”



Despite the group’s moderate success, Jackson and Yancy disbanded The Independents to seek other opportunities. Jackson and Yancy’s fortunes changed when they had a chance encounter with the daughter of Nat King Cole, who was performing at a local club in Chicago. Natalie Cole had been performing a collection of pop standards and soft rock songs, contemplating signing with a major label, but wary of being "exploited" as the daughter of a pop icon. That all changed when Jackson and Yancy took Cole into Curtis Mayfield’s Chicago studio and recorded the demo for what became “Inseparable.” As Cole told The New York Times Stephen Holden in 1976, “I went back to R&B with my producers who gave it a little extra sophistication.” That sophistication translated into Cole’s first album Inseparable (1975), recorded for her father’s longtime label Capitol. The album eventually spawned two chart-topping singles—the title track and “This Will Be”—and earned Cole two Grammy Awards in 1975 including the award for “Best R&B Performance, Female”—the first person not named Aretha Franklin to win that category in 8 years.

A year after the release of Inseparable, mainstream newspapers like The New York Times were publishing articles openly asking if Natalie Cole was the “new queen of Soul?” (November 21, 1976). If Cole seemed to have an affinity for Franklin’s style, it wasn’t an accident. Jackson and Yancy’s “You” was recorded by both Franklin and Cole in 1975 (it was the title track of Franklin’s 1975 album) and “This Will Be” was initially offered to Franklin. With musical taste changing, Jackson and Yancy (who was briefly married to Cole in the late 1970s) were able to package Cole with a pop-jazz sound, not unlike that of Cole’s father and Jerry Butler in the early 1960s, but with the Gospel sensibility that Jackson and Yancy were most familiar with. Cole alludes to this dynamic telling Leonard Feather in a 1976 Los Angeles Times piece, about her practices of overdubbing her own background vocals instead of using backup singers:

I imagine two group; I call the N sisters and the Colettes…the Colettes—they’re a commercial kind of group—and I’ve given them names like Jody, Betty and Suzie. But the Ns are gospel singers.

The Cole, Yancy, Jackson collaboration would produce five albums and several million-selling singles including 1977’s “I’ve Got Love on My Mind” (from Thankful) and “Our Love” which was released later in the year on Unpredictable. At her peak in the 1970s, Cole music was the very definition of crossover pop music, though it was always steeped in the Gospel aesthetic that Aretha Franklin helped mainstream a decade earlier. As Cole told Feather,

I really didn’t think I could sing all that good until I began working with [Chuck and Marvin], but they can communicate to me exactly what feeling they think is right for a particular song.

No doubt Jackson and Yancy’s time at The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop, contributed to them becoming better songwriters, but also helped them become much more adept at managing talent in the studio—something that is increasingly a lost art.

After the dissipation of her professional relationship with Jackson and Yancy and eventual divorce from Yancy (who was an emerging Gospel star when he died in 1985 at age of 35), Cole went through her well documented struggles with addiction, only to reemerge in 1991 as a major pop star by literally embracing her father’s musical legacy winning three Grammy Awards for Unforgettable…with Love (1991).

For Butler’s part, he was always clear about his investment in the songwriters workshop. As he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1973,

The idea for the workshop came out of self-interest. I had obligations to do thirty sides for Mercury…Tin Pan Alley, where you used to be able to go get a couple of songs, has died for all intents and purposes.” Butler added, “I knew Chicago was not the music center that it once was. But at the time, I knew there were a number of young cats in Chicago with a lot of songwriting talent, who just didn’t have any place to take it to. And even more important, nobody to encourage them. (quoted in Robert Pruter’s Chicago Soul).

Butler’s comments are just a reminder that great artists need great material and as the popular recording industry has become more producer driven and given to star-gazing, the industry is far more interested in discovering the next Aretha Franklin or Beyonce, than the next Carole King or Chuck Jackson and Marvin Yancy.

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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999) and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003). A frequent contributor to The Root.com (Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive), Neal maintains a blog at http://newblackman.blogspot.com. He is currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for NYU Press.