walking upstream…
Nat King Cole
photo: william p. gottlieb · public domain ↗Nat King Cole
sourcesIndiana Public Media / NPR Nightlights — Nat King Cole, Jazz Pianist (1957 DownBeat quote, Bill Charlap analysis, piano polls) · JazzProfiles (Dick Katz essay) — the Grand Terrace, Stanley Dance's Hines quote via Charlie Carpenter · Jerry Jazz Musician — interview with Will Friedwald (Armstrong's influence on Cole's humor and dual mastery) · Wikipedia — Straighten Up and Fly Right (the song's origin in Edward Coles's sermon parable) · Delancey Place — Nat King Cole's father was a preacher (family's move to Chicago, Second Progressive Baptist Church) · Wikipedia — Every Time I Feel the Spirit (1958 gospel album, First Church of Deliverance Choir)
In 1923 the Reverend Edward Coles moved his family from Montgomery, Alabama to Chicago's South Side to build a ministry, and installed his wife Perlina as organist and choir director of the church he founded there. She taught their son organ and, by twelve, formal piano — Bach and Rachmaninoff alongside gospel and hymn. The neighborhood supplied a second education: young Nat slipped out at night to sit outside clubs where Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Noone, and above all Earl Hines played, and by his teens he had absorbed Hines's rapid, horn-like right hand well enough to top the jazz magazines' own piano polls. Singing, when it came, was almost an afterthought: 1943's "Straighten Up and Fly Right," built from one of his father's own sermons, made him a star before he had finished being a pianist first.
the sound in question
1951
UnforgettableNat King Cole
walk the tributaries ↓
Earl Hines1930s · Jazz
Cole heard the model before he ever touched a professional piano: as a boy he slipped out to stand in the alley behind Chicago's Grand Terrace, a Bronzeville jazz club, absorbing Earl Hines's set through the wall. He never disguised the debt. Quoted in the jazz historian Stanley Dance's book on Hines, Cole told Hines's manager Charlie Carpenter, "Everything I am I owe to that man, because I copied him... he was my idol. He was always kind to me, and never too busy to say hello or to show me something." At sixteen he was already good enough to trade choruses against Hines's own orchestra in a band battle.
listen: upstream & here
1933
RosettaEarl Hines
1939
RosettaNat King Cole
listen forHines built his style on what critics called "trumpet-style piano" — rapid, horn-like right-hand runs over an angular left hand — and Cole, in a 1957 interview with the jazz magazine DownBeat, named the quality that hooked him: "It was his driving force that appealed to me." Play Hines's 1933 recording of "Rosetta," the tune he wrote and Cole kept in his own book for years, against the King Cole Trio's 1939 version: the same rippling right-hand line survives, but Cole flattens Hines's stride bass into an easy two-beat pulse built for guitar and bass instead of a left hand alone.
Perlina Adams ColesGospel
Cole's first teacher was his mother. Perlina Adams Coles played organ and led the choir at Chicago's True Light Baptist Church, where her husband preached, and she taught her son piano and organ before any other instructor did — the household practice ground for a boy who would later study Bach and Rachmaninoff alongside gospel and hymn. The musicologist Donna Cox, writing on Cole's overlooked ties to the Black church, argues that "the emotive power, communal emphasis and uplifting nature of Black sacred music profoundly shaped his artistry throughout his career," a debt visible less in any single lyric than in how he phrased everything after.
listen: upstream & heresource: The Conversation — Donna M. Cox on Perlina Adams Coles and the gospel foundation of Cole's artistry ↗
Hymns and spirituals led at True Light Baptist Church, Chicago (no recording survives)Perlina Adams Coles
listen forThere's no recording of Perlina's choir to check against — only the sound Cole carried out of that church. Listen to his 1958 gospel album Every Time I Feel the Spirit, cut with Chicago's First Church of Deliverance Choir: the call-and-response phrasing, the way he holds a beat before letting a note go, and the plain, unhurried diction are the same tools he used on pop ballads, borrowed straight from the pew rather than the nightclub.
Louis Armstrong1920s–30s · Jazz
From the same Chicago clubs, Cole absorbed something less technical than Hines's piano: Armstrong's willingness to be funny, to sing to entertain rather than only to impress. Cole's biographer Will Friedwald traced the connection directly, saying Cole "was never shy or hesitant to do a funny song... I think that is because of Armstrong." That permission mattered more than any single lick — Friedwald calls Cole the only other jazz figure who, like Armstrong, "completely mastered the equivalent of two different instruments," piano and voice, at the top of both.
listen: upstream & here
1928
Basin Street BluesLouis Armstrong
1943
Straighten Up and Fly RightNat King Cole
listen forThe two recordings share no melody, but they share a temperament: Armstrong's 1928 "Basin Street Blues" turns a blues lament into a loose, conversational aside, his phrasing bending around the beat rather than sitting on it. Cole's own "Straighten Up and Fly Right," a novelty built from one of his father's sermons, borrows exactly that relaxed, half-spoken delivery — a singer clearly enjoying the joke rather than selling it hard, the trick that let Armstrong turn entertainment into art without ever losing the swing underneath.