In 1956 the star singer and pianist Nat King Cole became the host of a weekly ... He wrote that For 13 months, I was the Jackie Robinson of television. I was the pioneer, the test case, the ...

It was 50 years ago that Nat King Cole went to ... a sort of Jackie Robinson with orchestral accompaniment. Just three years before Cole met the cheering crowds on Ipanema sand, he got a very ...

Despite his trailblazing role, Nat King Cole was no activist. Wilkins says Cole could not have gotten where he did displaying the political engagement, or the anger, of a Jackie Robinson.

Cole even hosted an elegant television variety show from November 1956 to December 1957. If Jackie Robinson broke baseball's segregation barrier in the late 1940s, then Nat King Cole did the same for ...

Josefina Santos for The New York Times Supported by By Alan Light In November 1956, Nat King Cole was given ... (He referred to himself as “the Jackie Robinson of television.”) ...

Echoing Cole himself, he points out that “Nat ‘King’ Cole was the Jackie Robinson of television.” “I did not want to make a pure jukebox musical,” he stresses, noting that, in his ...

Nat “King” Cole ... While he was with the show he married Nadine Robinson, a dancer. They were divorced in 1946. After the revue folded in 1937, Cole said he “played piano at almost every ...

Musical legend Nat "King" Cole was born Nathaniel ... which he met his first wife, Nadine Robinson—he formed a three-piece jazz band called the King Cole Swingsters, named after the British ...

What defined Nat King Cole's greatness, and his groundbreaking success, wasn't his piano playing; it was his voice. Nat King Cole: An Incandescent Voice Nat King Cole: An Incandescent Voice Nat ...