LOS ANGELES – It isn’t easy being the child of an icon, and early in her singing career, Natalie Cole resisted the legacy of her famous father, crooner Nat King Cole.
In the early 1970s, when one club owner billed her on the marquee as “The daughter of Nat King Cole,” she became angry, insisting she wanted to succeed under her own name. In concerts, she refused to sing her father’s songs.
“People said when I started, ‘Why don’t you just copy your father’s style?’ I had to be myself, singing my songs in my own way,” she told Jet magazine in 1976. Early on, she also told the magazine, people had tried calling her Natalie “Queen” Cole.
With a jazz-and-gospel-inflected voice whose power was undeniable, Cole eventually managed to emerge from the shadow of her legendary father, overcoming struggles with drug addiction and health problems to stake out her own successful career, selling more than 30 million albums and earning nine Grammy Awards. Yet Cole’s greatest triumph – both commercially and perhaps artistically – would come when she embraced her family history with the 1991 album “Unforgettable … With Love,” in which she recorded a series of her father’s favorite standards and sang a duet of one of his signature songs with him decades after his death.
Cole died Thursday from congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The singer, who had recently been forced to cancel several tour dates because of poor health, suffered from hepatitis C and various health complications from a 2009 kidney transplant from which she never fully recovered, according to her publicist, Maureen O’Connor. She was 65.