Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Voice by Nat Kennedy Ten Songs to Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Nat King Cole. A century after the birth of Nat King Cole on March 17, 1919 in Montgomery, Alabama, his voice continues to caress some of the most velvety melodies of the post-war period. A crooner friend of Sinatra’s, his roots were deep in gospel, and he was a brilliant pianist before he distanced himself from jazz. A victim of the discrimination of the time, a supporter of John F. Kennedy and of the civil rights movement, his sentimental songs remained distanced from political considerations. Until he passed away at age forty-five, Nat King Cole contributed significantly to the Great American Songbook with an impressive and abundant repertoire, including ten of its most beautiful pages. “Sweet Lorraine” (1940) A standard by Cliff Burwell and Mitchell Parish released in 1928, “Sweet Lorraine” gained popularity in 1940 with the twenty-one-year-old singer’s version. Yet at the end of the 1930’s, Nat King Cole was mainly a pianist. He was touring the clubs with the King Cole Trio, an instrumental group comprised of Oscar Moore on guitar and Wesley Prince on double bass. Responding one evening to a customer’s request to hear his voice, Nat King Cole caused a sensation on “Sweet Lorraine,” to the point that it was decided he should record the song in a Hollywood studio. That was the beginning of his singing career. “Straighten Up & Fly Right” (1943) “Straighten Up & Fly Right” by Nat King Cole and Irving Mills became the King Cole Trio’s greatest success, occupying the top spot on the Harlem Hit Parade for ten – then a list based on the rotation of songs on jukeboxes. Based on a traditional story that Nat’s father had used in a sermon, the song would be covered many times, from The Andrews Sisters to Dianne Reeves, Carmen McRae to Diana Krall. “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66” (1946) The first to perform “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66,” the King Cole Trio popularized this famous R&B song written by Bobby Troup as he drove from his native Pennsylvania to Los Angeles, where he hoped to launch his career as a songwriter. It’s a three-minute road trip that many rockers, including Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones and Van Morrison’s Them, would go on to take. “Nature Boy” (1948) “Nature Boy” was written in 1947 by Eden Ahbez, whose lifestyle inspired the hippie movement (he was camping under the “L” of the “Hollywood” panel overlooking Los Angeles). It became a major standard thanks to Nat King Cole, who recorded its first version in 1948 with a lavish orchestra. He did the same on the hits “Mona Lisa” and “Too Young,” taking him away from jazz but enabling him to win over white America. Now a superstar, Nat King Cole would part ways with his trio. As for “Nature Boy,” the song would go on to make a fortune of its author, who bragged about living on three dollars a week. “Orange Colored Sky” (1950) First sung by Jonny Edwards, “Orange Colored Sky” was popularized by Nat King Cole twenty years later, thanks in part to Stan Kenton’s orchestrations. Although the crooner had gone for mainstream music, this time he was accompanied by a pyrotechnic big band whose brass and choirs bounce between two piano parts. “Orange Colored Sky” rose to the top of the charts and many versions would follow, from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Lady Gaga. “Unforgettable” (1951) Included on the album of the same title, the song “Unforgettable” (written by Irving Gordon) is a deliciously misty serenade from 1951. It allowed Nat King Cole to display all the sweetness of his vocal timbre on Nelson Riddle’s precise arrangements. Today, the most famous version remains the one recorded — virtually — with his daughter, Natalie Cole. In 1991, a quarter of a century after her father’s death, she recorded this posthumous duo that was based on the an idea from one of Elvis Presley’s former musical directors, Joe Guercio; it won three Grammy Awards, while her cover album, Unforgettable… with Love , went seven times platinum. “Caravan” (1956) Although the jazz world blamed him for having moved to the dark side, Nat King Cole pushed aside the usual armada of strings, winds, and brass for the duration of an entire album. He recorded After Midnight with John Collins (guitar), Charlie Harris (double bass), Lee Young (drums), and a few guests, in order to reconnect with his beginnings. One passage of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” was enough to demonstrate his mastery of the piano. Mission accomplished: the crooner proved that he was still a hell of a jazzman. “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás” (1958) In 1958, Nat King Cole was keen to record an album of covers of Spanish-speaking songs — the outstanding Cole Español — with a large orchestra and mariachi. It was the summit of kitsch, but a summit nevertheless, whose artistic and commercial success justified two more reiterations of the same kind, A Mis Amigos (1959) and More Cole Español (1962). A new generation rediscovered this repertoire with Wong Kar-wai’s film In the Mood for Love (2000), whose soundtrack dug up “Aquellos Ojos Verdes,” “Te Quiero Dijiste,” and the classic “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás,” a Cuban folk song composed by Osvaldo Farrés in 1947. “Ramblin’ Rose” (1962) Although his career was on the decline, Nat King Cole remained an exceptional singer, capable of selling a million copies of a ritornello as innocuous as “Ramblin’ Rose.” The song, which many country artists would go on to cover, gave its title to one of the four albums he recorded in 1962. Behind this sleek image, Nat King Cole was nevertheless a supporter of the young John F. Kennedy, and he and his friend, Frank Sinatra, were involved in the civil rights movement. “L-O-V-E” (1965) Carried by an airy swing and sung with a smile that listeners can hear, “L-O-V-E” opened Nat King Cole’s last, eponymous album. After recording the original version in June 1964 at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, the crooner recorded five new ones in Japanese, German, Italian, Spanish and French (“Je ne repartirai pas”). The album was completed in December of the same year, just after his lung cancer was diagnosed. It was released in January 1965 and Nat King Cole died on February 15, at the age of forty-five. This love song is his artistic legacy. My 1996 interview with the late Nat Hentoff about his years at Down Beat magazine. The great journalist and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff died on Saturday at the age of 91. In 1996 I had the privilege of interviewing Hentoff and his former colleague Dom Cerulli for Northeastern University’s alumni magazine. Hentoff and Cerulli, who died in 2013, were both Northeastern alumni, and both served as the editor of the jazz magazine Down Beat in the 1950s. I can’t find the clip, but I did manage to dig up my last rewrite before I turned the article in to my editor. I cannot defend the way the piece opens; all I can say is that I’m glad I’ve continued to improve as a writer. Hentoff was a giant. His death creates a deep void, especially at this moment of crisis. It was the 1950s, Manhattan, 52nd Street. And it seemed like the whole world was in a groove. Check it out—over there, at the Five Spot. It’s Thelonious Monk, plunking out the chords to “ ’Round Midnight” on the house piano. Charlie Parker’s seen better days. You know how it is: sometimes he shows up, sometimes he doesn’t. But he’s still Bird, and if he can borrow an alto sax he’s supposed to be playing tonight at Birdland, the club they named after him. Dizzy Gillespie’s around, of course, only now he’s not playing much bop. He’s got himself this new trumpet that’s bent up toward the ceiling, and he’s doing some Afro-Cuban thing. Like the old guys? Well, they’re still holding forth. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, you name it. Miles Davis, that skinny kid trumpet player who used to be in Bird’s band, is starting to turn heads. And Charles Mingus has a band that’s making the biggest, wildest noise you’ve ever heard. “It was magical. It was incredible,” says Barry Kernfeld, editor of “The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz” (St. Martin’s, 1994). It was also a hell of a lot to keep track of. And from 1952 to ’59, two of the most important witnesses to this musical revolution were a couple of Northeastern guys, Nat Hentoff (Class of 1944) and Dom Cerulli (Class of 1951). They were the New York eyes and ears of Down Beat, a Chicago-based magazine that was—and still is —the most authoritative publication covering jazz. Hentoff, who’d joined Down Beat as a columnist in 1952, was named New York editor in 1953. Then, in 1957, when Hentoff left (actually, he was fired, which we’ll get to), he was replaced by his assistant, Cerulli. He, in turn, quit in 1959. “It was exhilarating,” says Hentoff, who, at 71, writes about civil liberties for The Village Voice and reviews jazz and country music for The Wall Street Journal. “I was in the clubs probably four or five nights a week, sometimes more. Hearing all that music. Getting to know the musicians. Getting to know the club owners, who were far less impressive personally but interesting in a Damon Runyan sort of way. For all those years, I did practically nothing but read about jazz, write about jazz, and listen to it.” Cerulli, 69, now a freelance writer and editor who’s currently putting together an album of classic dance-band music for the Smithsonian Institution, puts it more simply: “I had the job that every college kid in America wanted.” Nathan I. Hentoff’s childhood in the then-Jewish ghetto of Roxbury is movingly recounted in his autobiography, “Boston Boy” (Knopf, 1986). In that book and numerous others, he writes about how he first developed his love for jazz. One of his earliest musical memories was of laying in bed when he was 8 years old, during the Depression, and listening to Fats Waller’s “Your Feet’s Too Big” on the radio. Later, as a freshman reporter for The Northeastern News, he had a chance to interview his childhood idol. Indeed, jazz was a refuge for Hentoff during his years at Northeastern, a time that was marred by his battles with then-president Carl Ell over the direction of the News. Hentoff, after being named editor, sought to transform the sleepy paper into a crusading journal. For Ell, that was bad enough. But when Hentoff’s reporters began pestering the trustees with some probing questions, Ell decided to act. Hentoff writes in “Boston Boy” that he expected Ell would demand his resignation, and Hentoff was prepared to fight. Instead, the crafty Ell simply instructed his second-in- command, William C. White, to hand Hentoff and the rest of the News staff a written policy stating that the News was to confine its activities to the campus—and that it was not to bug the trustees. Hentoff and nearly the entire staff resigned. Thus Hentoff spent a considerable amount of time at “another institution of learning, the Savoy Café,” a jazz club on Huntington Avenue near Massachusetts Avenue. Like a jazz musician improvising on an ever-changing riff, Hentoff offers a flurry of memories in “Boston Boy,” some specific, some impressionistic, only rarely chronological. He writes about his education in race relations, a non-academic course in which he learned, among other things, that the owner of the Savoy paid off the cops so they wouldn’t hassle black musicians who were dating white women. He recalls his dangerous infatuation with a young black singer who was also the object of a black detective’s desire. And he remembers the drummer Jonathan “Jo” Jones, “the man who plays like the wind,” who took young Hentoff under his wing. “I never found out why Jo tapped me as a candidate for his relentless attention,” Hentoff writes. “It happened when I was nineteen. Jo, seated at the back booth at the Savoy, beckoned imperiously. ‘It is time,’ he said in his raspy staccato voice, ‘for you to find out what you have to know if you are going to write about this music.’” Following graduation, Hentoff worked as a disc jockey for the old WMEX, and it was some years before this brilliant but underemployed young man got the break he needed. Finally it came. He’d been doing some stringing for Down Beat, reviewing records, concerts, and the like. And that led to fame, if not fortune, in the form of a column, called “Counterpoint,” which debuted on February 8, 1952, on page one. Hentoff started with a bang, denouncing Maynard Ferguson as “the most tasteless, overrated trumpet player this side of Clyde McCoy.” McCoy’s name is pretty much lost to history, but Ferguson went on to enjoy a lengthy, successful career. (“You see the effect of a critic?” Hentoff asks, laughing.) The column was a success—or, as Hentoff dryly puts it in “Boston Boy,” it was “sufficiently quarrelsome and arrogant to bring a good deal of mail, the tenor of which suggested that I set my face to the Atlantic Ocean and keep walking in that direction.” Down Beat’s New York editor, Leonard Feather, was eager to step aside; Hentoff was named to take his place, for a weekly salary of $175. Dominic P. Cerulli’s childhood was the Italian-American parallel to Hentoff’s Jewish experience. Like Hentoff, he grew up in an ethnic working- class neighborhood of Boston, in this case Orient Heights, in East Boston. He remembers going to his first jazz concert as a young boy in the mid- 1930s. A black jazz band, sponsored by Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, was appearing in the neighborhood. “It was the first time I ever saw black people,” Cerulli recalls. “And it was the first time I was within 10 feet of live music, other than an accordion at a wedding reception. The minute those guys hit that first note, I was gone. The funny thing was that at the end of the evening, when my grandmother was taking me home, she was holding my hand—we had to walk maybe six blocks—and I was stumbling at every curbstone. Finally she said, ‘What in the world is wrong with you?’ And I said, ‘I’ve got my eyes closed.’ ‘Why?’ I said, ‘I want to keep all the music in.’ I really wanted to keep that music alive.” Cerulli enrolled in Northeastern’s engineering program in September 1944, four months before Hentoff would graduate. He promptly flunked out, though he earned an “A” in English and an “A” in mechanical drawing. At that point he decided to join the Navy; he was shipped to the Pacific on an aircraft carrier just ​in time to see the end of the war. He returned to Northeastern in 1946, this time as an English-journalism major, his education financed by the GI Bill. Like Hentoff, he got involved with The Northeastern News. And like Hentoff, he pursued his interest in jazz. At a panel discussion he organized at Richards Hall that included Hentoff, Cerulli says it became clear that Hentoff was—well, a bit behind the times. “Afterwards I lent him three of my bebop records, and I said, ‘This is what’s going on in music now, Nat,’” Cerulli says. “Then, the next thing I knew, I was reporting for work at Down Beat, and there he was. He was up to his ass in modern music. And to this day he has not returned those records.” Following graduation, Cerulli went to work for United Press. The highlight: chartering a boat so that he could mount a sinking oil tanker off Cape Cod during a winter hurricane. Later he was hired by The Boston Globe to cover the Statehouse. Politics wasn’t to Cerulli’s liking, though, “because it made the guys so cynical.” When his editors started talking about sending him to Washington, he adds, “I could foresee a long future of cynicism on the national level.” Since Cerulli lived on Exeter Street, right near Storeyville, Boston’s premier jazz club, he dropped a note to Down Beat, suggesting that he become the magazine’s Boston stringer. He clicked, and when the Globe dispatched him to the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, he met with Down Beat’s editors, where he signed a deal to go to New York as a staff writer under Hentoff. The 1950s was a time when interest in jazz was exploding, fueled not just by the remarkable talent that had gathered in New York, but by the development of the long-playing record. The evolution of Down Beat was as rapid as the move from 78 to LP. A newspaper since its founding in 1934, it switched to magazine format on April 20, 1955, an issue devoted to the news of Charlie Parker’s death the preceding month. For a few more years, the inside of the biweekly magazine continued to look like the funky pages of a 1950s-style newspaper. That changed in 1957 when Down Beat adopted a redesign, largely at Cerulli’s instigation, that gave it the look and feel of a modern magazine. At the risk of oversimplification, it might be said that Hentoff took on the heavy topics while Cerulli focused on lighter, more pop-oriented material. “If there was any difference between Nat and me, other than Nat’s beard, it was that Nat was very serious about the social implications of the music and the effect of society on the musicians,” Cerulli says. “I tried to be a journalist working in an idiom. Nat had set much higher goals. I also think I like a lot more commercial music than Nat can tolerate.” Yet Hentoff could veer off in a pop direction himself. Like Cerulli, he was an admirer of Eydie Gormé back when she was a struggling young singer. And as he’s gotten older, Hentoff has become a big fan of country music—a passion he shares with Charlie Parker, who once told a young musician who couldn’t understand why the great Bird liked hillbilly music, “Listen to the stories. Listen to the stories.” “They were both very, very knowledgeable about the music,” says Jeff Stout, a trumpet player and alumnus of Buddy Rich’s band. Stout, who teaches jazz history at the Berklee College of Music, started reading Down Beat as a 12-year-old during the ’50s. “Hentoff, in particular, was very literate,” he says. “It was very intelligent, right to the point, humorous. And from Cerulli’s columns, you’d know what was going on.” The end of Hentoff and Cerulli’s collaboration came abruptly, in June 1957. “I had been complaining for months and years that we had no blacks on staff anywhere, and here we were making money off black music,” Hentoff recalls. “The boss, the boss, John Maher, was a bigot. And I finally decided, ‘The hell with this.’ There was an opening; it wasn’t a lofty position, essentially a receptionist/secretary. And a young woman came in who seemed very bright and good—and dark—and I hired her. That’s why I got fired.” Surprisingly, Cerulli says he’d never heard that story. He was told there was a financial squeeze, an excuse he later came to believe was untrue, and that Maher had decided to keep him rather than Hentoff because Hentoff was making more money. Cerulli says he nearly quit after hearing Hentoff had been fired, but was talked out of it by a couple of friends at RCA. “I remember we went into some little Chinese restaurant, and sat at the bar and drank our lunch,” he says. “They finally convinced me that I should stay. And I tore up the letter of resignation I had written.” The current publisher of Down Beat, Kevin Maher, did not respond to a request for an interview. Cerulli continued alone for two more years before a new top editor in Chicago decreed that staff members would no longer have bylines. Now, in addition to long hours and low pay, he would have to contend with anonymity. It was time to get out. “It still rankles to this day,” he says. After leaving Down Beat, Nat Hentoff began writing a column for the then-new Village Voice. He took no money at first; his only condition was that he would not have to write about jazz, so that he could expand his range. He also wrote freelance pieces for The New Yorker, among other publications, and became known as one of the country’s foremost civil libertarians. Dom Cerulli went in an entirely different direction, working for record companies and finally for himself, primarily in public relations and advertising. He’s been active with the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which administers the Grammy Awards. Once he was even nominated for a Grammy, for the liner notes to Adlai Stevenson’s “The Voice of the Uncommon Man.” Indeed, Cerulli became such a prolific writer of liner notes that he produced some of them under the byline of “Ferris Benda”—the name of his character in “The Fourth Estate,” a musical he performed in at Northeastern to benefit the library fund. Though Cerulli and Hentoff are not regularly in touch, the bond remains. Hentoff wrote the introduction to “The Jazz Word” (Da Capo Press, 1987), an anthology that Cerulli co-edited. And Cerulli recently wrote Hentoff a note of praise after Hentoff produced a column for the Voice denouncing the Republican Congress’s assault on the Fourth Amendment. Both men are less than thrilled with the direction jazz took after the 1950s—the atonality of free jazz in the 1960s and the simplistic commercialism of fusion, an electrified hybrid of jazz and rock, in the 1970s. Hentoff praises the role of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis in bringing a new generation of black musicians and audiences to classic jazz, but he finds Marsalis’s technically brilliant playing rather joyless, and he can’t understand why today’s young stars seem to be stuck in the bop and post-bop styles of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Indeed, Hentoff’s personal favorite remains the emotionally fragile tenor saxophonist Lester Young, “The Prez,” whose did his finest playing in the 1930s and early ’40s. In “Boston Boy,” Hentoff tells a heartbreaking story about what he considers his most lasting musical achievement: a live television program, “The Sound of Jazz,” that he helped put together for CBS in 1957. Among those on hand were tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, and, most important, Billie Holiday and Lester Young, former lovers, both ravaged by years of alcohol and drug abuse, both near the end of their lives. Young was barely able to function, and was ultimately dropped from everything except “Fine and Mellow,” on which he was to accompany Lady Day. “It was time for Prez,” Hentoff writes. “[Producer Robert] Herridge had signaled the floor manager to tell Prez to play from his chair. If he got up, he might collapse on prime time. But when the moment came, Prez stood and, looking at Lady, played in one chorus—its colors those of twilight in October—the sparest, most penetrating blues I have ever heard. Billie, a slight smile on her face, kept nodding to the beat, her eyes meeting Prez’s, her nod invoking memories only she and Prez shared. As he ended his solo, Lady’s face was full of light and love, and Prez, briefly, was back in the world. “In the control room, Herridge, I, the associate producer, the engineers, were not surprised to see each other crying. “On the set, after the hour was over, Billie, pleased with the show, came over and kissed me. Lester was gone, somewhere in space.” The Voice by Nat Kennedy. John Bachman tiene una voz mágica. Literalmente. Su música country se hunde profundamente en la mente de una persona y pone a todos de un humor feliz, elevado y positivo. Sus conciertos están llenos. Sus fans son incontables. Sus fans están dedicados. Sus fans están enfocados. Sus fans son peligrosos. Kenny Colorado es uno de los muchos guardaespaldas personales asignados para proteger a John de sus fans más rabiosos. Kenny sobresale en su trabajo. Desafortunadamente, John sobresale por ser John. Nat King Cole Still Remains 'One Of The Great Gifts Of Nature' 100 Years Later. Nat 'King' Cole having a smoke while disembarking from a plane in 1963. Evening Standard/Getty Images. Born 100 years ago today, Nat King Cole was one of the most popular and influential entertainers of the 20th century. As an African American ballad singer and jazz musician, he topped the charts year after year, sold more than 50 million records, pushed jazz piano in a new direction and paved the way for later generations of performers. "Nat King Cole's voice is really one of the great gifts of nature," Daniel Mark Epstein, author of the 1999 biography Nat King Cole, says. "Remember, he was never trained as a singer. And so, his voice is absolutely pure. He's a baritone with absolutely perfect pitch. He sings the notes true and he hits them right in the center." Born Nathaniel Adams Coles in Montgomery, Ala., on March 17, 1919, the child prodigy was later raised in Chicago. Cole's mother taught the him to play the piano when he was four, and at 15, he dropped out of high school to lead his own bands. His first recordings show the influence of his idol, Earl Hines. By the time he was 18, Cole was married, living in Los Angeles and fronting a nightclub act with a name that riffed on a nursery rhyme — the King Cole Trio — featuring guitar, bass and piano, but not a lot of vocals. The King Cole Trio had a huge influence, inspiring other jazz musicians like Oscar Peterson and Ahmad Jamal to form similar trios. Epstein says if Cole had never crooned a note, he would still be an important figure in jazz. 50 Great Voices. Nat King Cole: An Incandescent Voice. "He really is, I would say, one of our top five greatest and most influential jazz pianists," Epstein says. Johnny Mathis, the 83-year-old balladeer who grew up listening to Cole as his father's favorite singer in the 1940s, later met and became friends with him after moving to Beverly Hills in 1958. "Nat King Cole was the God of popular music in our house," Mathis says with a laugh. "That is the way that I fell in love with his music, is through his piano playing, then of course, I occasionally listened to him singing — that wasn't too bad either." The Nat King Cole Trio had one hit after another, and its leader became wildly popular. In 1946, the King Cole Trio landed a national radio show – the first of its kind to be hosted by an African-American musician. Soon, Cole began to play less jazz and sing more ballads . Nat King Cole plays with his jazz orchestra on the stage of The Apollo Theater, in Harlem, N.Y. in the 1950s. Eric Schwab/AFP/Getty Images hide caption. Nat King Cole plays with his jazz orchestra on the stage of The Apollo Theater, in Harlem, N.Y. in the 1950s. Eric Schwab/AFP/Getty Images. By the 1950s, Cole's repertoire was mostly love songs backed by strings. He told a Swiss television reporter he was simply giving his fans what they wanted. "You see, it's not a case of my personal likes," Cole said in the interview. "I try to please as many people as I possibly can and if I find the people like certain things, I try to give them what they like. And that's good business too, you see." According to Epstein, Cole saw himself as an entertainer, not an activist. But his April 10, 1956 performance in Alabama was a crucial moment in race relations. "He went down to the South to perform with an interracial band, which was pretty bold and offensive to a lot of whites," Eptein explains. "But then he agreed to play for segregated audiences, which offended his black audience." Cole agreed to play a 10 p.m. show at the Birmingham Municipal Auditorium for black audiences, and an early show for white audiences, which attracted a group of local white supremacists. "The White Citizens Council of Alabama had this plot to kidnap Cole from the theater, Eptein says. "The plot failed, but the hoodlums did storm the stage, break up the performance. They knocked Nat Cole off the piano bench and injured his back." The Record. 'The Nat King Cole Show': From The Small Screen To Your Computer Screen, Finally. A doctor treated Cole in his dressing room, and the singer returned to the stage for the late show. The incident made national news, and seven months later, Cole became the first major African-American musician to host a national television variety show. The Nat King Cole Show had a large audience, but no national sponsor would back a show with a black host for fear of alienating Southern viewers. NBC was losing money, and Cole canceled the weekly program after a little more than a year. However, Epstein says Cole continued to reach a wide audience through records that topped the charts. "That was the great gift of his charisma," Epstein says. "That there was so much passion in his voice and so much intelligence, he was able to transcend the color barrier." Cole didn't live long enough to see his career overshadowed by rock and roll. A heavy smoker all his life, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1964 and went into the studio for the last time in June of that year. Only 45 years old, Cole died on Feb. 15, 1965. "He was the nicest man you'd ever want to meet in your life," Mathis recalls of his friend. "Just a very down-to-earth person who happened to be one of the greatest musicians of all time. And he became, of course, a model for so many people, especially someone like myself." We’ve Been Talking About Bob Dylan’s Singing Voice Wrong All This Time. What if the thing everybody disparages about the acclaimed songwriter is actually his secret strength? When I was getting ready to write this piece, I did something that’s not uncommon for me: I listened to a lot of Bob Dylan songs. But this time, I went about it differently. I focused on the man’s voice. That might seem strange. For decades, music fans have tuned in to Frank Sinatra or Aretha Franklin or Al Green to savor the beauty of their singing, but with Dylan, the vocals have, traditionally, been the thing fans learn to live with — the flaw in the diamond of his genius. Sure, he’s a poet and a trailblazer, responsible for one of the most important music catalogues of the last 60 years, but if he’s got a weakness, it’s that his singing has never been particularly strong. Who’d want to spend their free time zeroing in on his voice ? Dylan’s supposedly poor singing has long been considered his Achilles’ heel. In a 1966 Playboy interview, the late music critic Nat Hentoff painted a picture of the songwriter’s early days in New York City, noting that while no one doubted the young man’s talent, the voice gave some pause. “Some found its flat Midwestern tones gratingly mesmeric; others agreed with a Missouri folk singer who had likened the Dylan sound to that of ‘a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire,’” Hentoff wrote, later adding, “the voice was so harsh and the songs so bitterly scornful of conformity, race prejudice and the mythology of the Cold War that most of his friends couldn’t conceive of Dylan making it big even though folk music was already on the rise.” Of course, Dylan became a superstar, but the stigma around his singing voice has never wavered, prompting comics and others to do a now- familiar impression of his nasally, keening delivery. Everybody does the Dylan Voice. When Joni Mitchell toured with Dylan in the late 1990s, she’d do one verse of “Big Yellow Taxi” as him, mockingly letting fly with a series of drawn-out vowels and garbled lyrics. When Loudon Wainwright III recorded “Talking New Bob Dylan,” which looked at all the artists (including himself) who had been labelled the “new Bob Dylan” back in the day, he mimicked Dylan’s singing style. Dana Carvey whipped out his Dylan on Saturday Night Live . Everybody you know can do Dylan — it’s not that difficult. But that snide, smug imitation shortchanges what is, actually, a dextrous and remarkable instrument. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I think Dylan’s voice is rather beautiful. No one will confuse him with the far more powerful and polished singers whose voices seem to have been touched by the divine — Dylan’s is utilitarian by comparison. But over the years, he’s done a lot with not much, finding new ways to be expressive, evocative, downright gorgeous within the narrow vocal range the musical gods gave him. Other singers sound like they came straight from heaven. Bob Dylan is the master of the colloquial and the conversational — he sings the way you and I do. When he started out, Dylan’s acoustic strum and clarion-call vocals were very much in keeping with a rising folk movement shepherded by Woody Guthrie, whose proudly unpretty voice echoed the stark truths embedded in his lyrics. Dylan emulated Guthrie, and you can hear it in the sing- speak style of his earliest material. But pretty soon, that intentionally artless delivery began to soften, locating a tenderness at the heart of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” that gave those protest anthems their soul. There’s a modesty emanating from that wise- beyond-his-years kid — he wasn’t yet 23 — that both underlines the boldness of his words and accentuates the vulnerability of someone so young putting an older generation on notice. Plus, he could be a lovely balladeer, adapting the traditional love song “Corrina, Corrina” or writing his own with “She Belongs to Me.” Lacking the swagger of Mick Jagger or the sweetness of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Dylan’s unaffected plainness was startling and charming, his voice bringing out the disarming humanity in his proclamations of faith and devotion. Unquestionably, his voice could cut like jagged glass, offering the opposite of a soothing listen. But look how well he wielded it when he was expressing pain — marvel at the sneering putdown that is “Like a Rolling Stone,” the anguished fare-thee-well of “Positively 4th Street,” or the bitter tirade that powers “Idiot Wind.” (The original version of “Idiot Wind” from 1975’s Blood on the Tracks , I mean — seek out the alternate take, found on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 , where the arrangement is far more mournful, and you’ll hear a very different Dylan, the sad-eyed heartbreak evident in his despondent delivery.) Sinatra, whom Dylan adores, could transform romantic woe into exquisite misery through his rich voice, but Dylan’s workingman’s style allowed no such sophisticated means of escape. Instead, he provided a bracing, unvarnished realness that anyone could relate to. His divorce album Blood on the Tracks isn’t just his finest collection — it also contains his most emotional vocal performances, a dazzling mixture of the regret, anger, denial, sadness and acceptance that were the byproduct of his marriage to Sara spintering. (A year later, he was still singing to her, closing Desire with the crushing “Sara,” where he sounds humbled and haunted, his voice weeping as pointedly as Scarlet Rivera’s backing violin.) Another annoyance about society’s lazy Dylan imitation is that it doesn’t take into account how he’s refashioned his instrument over time. His wonderfully laid-back 1969 country album Nashville Skyline saw him affecting a romantic croon, supposedly the result of the musician laying off cigarettes. (As Dylan once put it, “I tell you, you stop smoking those cigarettes, and you’ll be able to sing like Caruso.”) He’s perhaps never produced anything as romantic as “Lay Lady Lay,” his singing full of longing and desire, although the album-closing “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” comes close, with Dylan discovering a boyish glee as he says goodbye to his loneliness after finding the love of a good woman. That era of domestic bliss with Sara — before the dissolution heard on Blood on the Tracks — saw his vocals grow more relaxed and mature. Even if the material wasn’t always his strongest — few want to defend the tossed-off 1970 effort Self-Portrait — Dylan was shapeshifting with his voice as much as he was with his musical styles, trying to understand how his singing could evolve along with the rest of him. But even the great singers have to contend with age and the inevitable changes that occur to the larynx. His voice got more rumbly in the 1980s and early ‘90s, although his work with the Traveling Wilburys seemed to loosen him up a little, almost as if he seemed grateful to drop the baggage of being Bob Dylan™ and instead assume the carefree persona of an anonymous half-brother in that fictitious roots-rock band. But by the end of that decade, he’d latched onto an arresting new vocal identity, that of a doomed truth-teller casting a dark eye on decimated love affairs and encroaching mortality. In the 2004 edition of The New Rolling Stone Album Guide , Rob Sheffield lovingly referred to Dylan’s “sinister rusted- muffler growl” on 1997’s Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind , which the critic enthused “sounded as though he’d been sucking exhaust pipes.” Ghostly and dark, Dylan’s new voice was a revelation, like the poisoned declarations of a cursed man about to walk off into a bleak, uncertain future. On tracks like “Can’t Wait” and “Love Sick,” he hisses and insinuates, playing a prophet of world-weary sorrow. As atmospheric as the musical arrangements are, it’s Dylan’s voice that’s the main attraction — he seduces you with his foreboding menace. Time Out of Mind was a critical and commercial comeback, and Dylan capitalized on it, further exploring this new vocal style on the splendid Love & Theft , where he cribbed from the styles and singers of the pre-rock era to make like a modern-day Bing Crosby on “Moonlight” or lament failed relationships in wistful country-ish tunes like “Mississippi” or the spectrally bereaved “Sugar Baby.” If Dylan’s voice in his younger years had never sounded particularly forceful, the older man embodied his songs through sheer presence, filling the room and commanding your attention. No longer straining, he found his comfort zone as a grizzled old pro spewing gloomy prophecy and even having a laugh or two. (“Po’ Boy” is a masterclass in corny puns and dopey zingers elevated by Dylan’s warm, easygoing delight in pretending he’s a long-lost Marx brother.) Dylan has never stopped recording, continuing to baffle fans with holiday albums ( Christmas in the Heart ) and a suite of Sinatra-era tunes (three albums of covers now compiled on Triplicate ). Last year came Rough and Rowdy Ways , where he hit us with “My Own Version of You,” a bluesy shuffle featuring a twisted scenario involving the narrator trying to construct an ideal lover out of discarded body parts. As he reaches 80, his voice is starting to crumble, but outside of someone like Willie Nelson, who may indeed be immortal, that’s just inevitable. Even so, his failing instrument brings extra poignancy to his bittersweet reminiscence “Murder Most Foul,” as if he’s trying to memoralize John F. Kennedy and every worthwhile piece of pop culture that’s come since before he shuffles off this mortal coil. He has so much more to say before his voice gives out completely. Over the decades, many musicians have covered Dylan, sometimes to brilliant effect. (Even Dylan thinks “All Along the Watchtower” belongs to Jimi Hendrix now.) Often, these covers are more fetching, smoother, lit up with grace and beauty. Dylan has taken note: In his memoir Chronicles , he recalled angelic singer Aaron Neville’s version of “With God on Our Side” and “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” “It always surprises me to hear a song of mine done by an artist like this who is on such a high level,” he wrote. “Over the years, songs may get away from you, but a version like this always brings it closer again.” Maybe, but it’s Dylan’s voice that first made those songs resonate. All the great lines he’s dreamed up over the years wouldn’t have meant as much without his impassioned performances, his earthy delivery, his weathered croak and intimate croon. For anyone who loves this man’s music, it’s foolish to discount the singing that has accompanied these indelible songs. His voice has articulated an everyman quality that’s added depth and feeling to his underdog anthems and universal explorations of love and death. We shouldn’t explain away or justify his singing as if it were some liability. It’s at the very center of his work, the heartbeat of a genius whose imperfect instrument animates the power of his words. The Coen brothers masterpiece Inside Llewyn Davis concerns the title character (Oscar Isaac), a struggling New York folk singer in the early 1960s trying to make his name. The film is a melancholy portrait of failures and never-beens — the artists who missed their moment in the sun. As the film winds to its conclusion, Llewyn is at a folk club when the punchline to his life appears on the stage in the form of a relative newcomer who’s not named. But we and Llewyn know his fate is sealed when the young man with the wild hair and angular features goes to the mic. It’s not the song or the look of Bob Dylan in Inside Llewyn Davis that symbolizes the titanic force he’ll be in popular music. It’s the way he sings. He doesn’t sound like Llewyn Davis or anybody else. And despite all the people who have tried to imitate the Dylan Voice, no one has sounded like him since.