Nat King Cole “Unforgettable” songbook.
Sheet music for piano with vocal and guitar chords.
33 songs included:
- Answer me my Love
- Autumn leaves (les feuilles mortes)
- A Blossom fell
- Calypso Blues
- The Christmas Song
- Darling je vous aime beaucoup
- I remember you
- It’s only a Paper Moon
- Let there be Love
- Love is the Thing
- Love Letters
- Lush Life
- Mona Lisa
- Moon Love
- Nature Boy
- Ramblin’ Rose
- Red Sails in the Sunset
- (get your kicks on) Route 66
- Smile
- Star Dust
- Straighten up and fly right
- Sweet Lorraine
- Tangerine
- That’s my Girl
- These foolish Things
- Those lazy-hazy-crazy Days of Summer
- Tonight you belong to me
- Twilight on the Trail
- Unforgettable
- When I fall in Love
- When I take my Sugar to Tea
- Where can I go without you?
- Yes we have no Bananas
Free download:
https://sheetmusic.me/nat-king-cole-unforgettable
Free download for educational purposes only. Not for commercial use.
For commercial use, buy “Unforgettable” Songbook on Amazon:
https://amzn.to/39iOSZ5
It was the year 1937. In America, the hopes of everyone were rooted in the word “recovery”. But if the depression seemed to be nearing an end for most of the nation, it had only deepened early that year for the wandering minstrels of a road show with the peculiarly fitting title “Shuffle Along”.
The revue had shuffled all the way from Chicago to Long Beach, California, when an employee with ob viously scant optimism for the show’s future resigned without notice. More than that, he helped himself to the company’s entire bankroll, $800.00, as his severance pay. “Shuffle Along” ground to a dead stop right there – and disintegrated.
Being broke and stranded in a strange town is never a pleasure to anyone. To one member of the company, its 18-year-old bandleader, Nathaniel Adams Coles, it was akin to a major calamity. Not only was he a rookie in show business, but he was very reluctant to write home for money since his father, the Rev. Edward Coles, a Baptist minister in Chicago, was considerably less than enthusiastic over having his children trotting around the country tooting horns and plunking pianos.
Young Nat wisely decided to make the best of his bad bargain and rough it out in California — at least until he could raise enough money to home with his head held high.
For the next several months he pounded beer-soaked Baldwins and Scotch-stained Steinways in dives from Bakerfield to San Diego. His asking price was five bucks a night, but he could be had for less, and usually was.
During that year one thing happened to the lanky, good-natured youngster. He abbreviated his name to Nat Cole, and one night while he was working in the old Los Angeles Century Club, a gagster slipped a paper crown on his head and dubbed him “King. ” From that night forward, he was to be Nat “King” Cole.
From the fold-up of “Shuffle Along,” his life was punctuated with setbacks that turned out to be breaks. Some of them were large enough to provide him with footholds in his climb to the top of one of the toughest heaps in the world.
His singing was perhaps the most outstanding example. One of Cole’s stops on his job-hunting rounds as an itinerant pianist was a Hollywood nightclub, the Swanee Inn. Their manager offered to pay Cole $75 a week if he could come up with a quartet overnight. After time, for that kind of money, Nat would have produced the Philadelphia Symphony — or at least tried. He rushed out and corralled guitarist Oscar Moore, bass player Wesley Prince and a drummer whose name remains unrecorded because he failed to show up for work on opening night.
The trio was hardly an immediate sensation. That was the era of the big bands. Club owners demanded plenty of bodies and plenty of noise for their money. An instrumental trio — the group was strictly voiceless — was about as marketable as a vaudeville juggling act. Still, the “King” Cole Swingsters, as they were known then, did begin attracting the attention of jazz aficionados, attracted by the trio’s musical purity, tn time, dub bookers became aware that these fans, small in number and strange in tastes though they might be, were willing to put their money where their loyalty was. When that understanding got around, Cole and his cohorts found that they were working with encouraging regularity. Sometimes their leader’s take-home pay ran as high as $25 a week.
…It was during this cushy engagement at the Swanee Inn in Los Angeles, that Cote suffered another humiliating setback — or so, at least, it seemed to him at the time. One of those inevitable lushes in the audience, who wouldn’t have known a dissonant chord from a harpsichord and wouldn’t have cared, came stumbling to the bandstand and demanded that Nat sing his favorite tune “Sweet Lorraine”.
Nat was gentle. “We don’t sing”, he said softly.
The portly patron was in no mood to be put off, however. He brought his eyes to focus on Cole and in the voice of a platoon sergeant commanded, “Sing!” That brought the manager of the place on the double. He summed up the situation on his mental cash register and gave Cole the word: “Sing. This guy’s a big spender. Sometimes three bucks a night”.
Nat Cole sang, nervously, reluctantly and, although there were no critics around at the time to comment on his performance, probably not very well. That voice was to become among the best-kno wn in the world of popular music.
If Nat Cole’s success story followed the Hollywood film formula, that first timorous rendition of Sweet Lorraine would have been the climax. But it wasn’t. The truth is that Cole wasn’t then particularly impressed with his voice, although in the years since then critics have graced it with such terms as pussy-willow textured
And so he submerged himself again in the trio, which prospered increasingly as its cult of followers swelled. The bookings were progressively better until the group reached the once famous Trocadero, where a room was named for it.
With that sort of encouragement, the next logical step was a nation-wide tour. It was logical, but it wasn’t especially successful. The trio’s lukewarm reception was made worse when bass player Prince was drafted into the Army. Cole’s return to the kindlier atmosphere of Los Angeles was anything but triumphant.
Meantime, however, Glenn Wallichs, a music store owner whom Cole had met while playing at the Radio Room next door, had teamed with songwriter Johnny Mercer and formed a new recording company — Liberty Records, later to become Capitol.
The company struggled through its first year and, in 1943, Wallichs heard Cole and his reorganized trio play “Straighten Up And Fly Right, ” a tune Nat had written during his lean years and sold for $50 to pay the rent. On the strength of it, Wallichs offered Cole a contract to record that song and do some other solo singing. That last part didn’t appeal to Nat much, but he agreed. “Straighten Up And Fly Right, ” of course, was the first of his — and Capitol’s — smash hits.