MUSIC: Nat King Cole

Last summer, the radios of America rose up in rebellion against the oligarchy of rock and rap and started broadcasting something completely different: the suave tones of a longdead pop balladeer. Nat King Cole and his daughter Natalie, who was only fifteen years old when her father died of lung cancer in 1965, were reunited by means of modern recording technology for a duet version of Cole's 1951 hit single "Unforgettable," an old-fashioned love song redolent of the far-off days of bottled milk, cheap gasoline, and Burma-Shave. To the amazement of the popular music industry, "Unforgettable" flew to the top of the pop charts, and the album from which it came, a collection of twenty-four standards originally recorded by Cole and remade to excellent effect by his daughter, along with its impressive sales, won seven Grammy awards. Not only did Natalie Cole's flagging musical career suddenly leap back into high prominence, but a new generation of listeners discovered, forty years after the fact, one of American popular music's most distinctive singers. All in all, 1991 was a very good year for Nat Cole. St. Martin's Press published Leslie Gourse's Unforgettable: The Life and Mystique of Nat King Cole, the third full-length biography of Cole to appear to date. Capitol Records continued to transfer his classic albums of the fifties and sixties to compact disc. Stash Records began to issue a series of CDs derived from airchecks of Cole's late-forties radio series. His television shows were repackaged, syndicated, and released on videocassette. Even PBS, always on the qui vive