Freddy Cole, RIP

For reasons we cannot explain we’ve long been fascinated by the famous people who were overshadowed by an even more famous people. Our two brothers have certain talents we do not possess, but not to the extent we ever felt overshadowed, so that can’t explain our affinity for all those less-famous siblings.

Bob Crosby’s Bobcats was a popular and top-notch if slightly outdated dixieland jazz band during the swing era, but he was never as famous as his brother Bing. Dom DiMaggio was an outstanding pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, but his brother Joe won championships with the New York Yankees and was by far the bigger star. Warren “Baby” Dodds is regarded as the first great jazz drummer, but he was always called “Baby” because his older brother Johnny is regarded as the first great jazz clarinetist. Here in Kansas you’ll see roads and buildings named for Milton Eisenhower, well regarded as president of Kansas State University and two other institutions of higher learning, but his brother Dwight was President of the United States. Liza Minelli and Betty Hutton and June Carter all had sisters who were so talented it’s a shame they’re largely overlooked.

We were reminded of this by an obituary in the Washington Post for Freddy Cole, who died Saturday at the age of 88. You’ve probably never heard of him, but he was a terrific jazz and soul and standards singer and pianist, and he was very popular in some unlikely foreign markets and managed to live comfortably off his talents over many decades, even though he never achieved the fame of older brother Nat “King” Cole.

Nat “King” Cole was one of the all the time greats, especially with his jazz trio but also with all the heavily-arranged pop stuff that made him rich, but his younger brother was pretty damn good. At first the younger brother was satisfied that his all-state status playing high school basketball surpassed what his brother had done on the athletic fields, but after an injury he decided to go with his musical talent. Freddy Cole was 12 years younger than Nat Cole, and by the time he started his musical career the older brother was the first black man to host a national television show and one of the most popular singers in the world, which didn’t do the younger brother much good.

Freddy Cole had a gorgeous voice and smooth piano patter similar to his older brother, but he mostly resisted the club owners and record producers who wanted him to cover the songs and imitate the style of Nat’s records. He had a bluesier sound than his brother, informed by a dozen years of musical trends trending toward to soul music, and it kept him steadily employed at fancy nightclubs and dives and honky-tonks. Along the way he had some regional hits, and was briefly a big deal in Brazil. When he turned 60, decades after his brother’s premature death, he started to get some recognition, racking up major label deals and several grammy nominations.

Freddy Cole left us on Saturday with an impressive body of work, even if you’ve never heard of him, and we think Nat “King” Cole would have been proud of his kid brother.

— Bud Norman

A Post-Romantic Valentine’s Day

People still fall in love, we suppose, but our modern culture seems to have lost the knack for it.

This is an age of hanging out, hook-ups, and cohabitation, when subsidized contraception is considered an entitlement, abortion on demand is deemed a civilizational necessity, and yet baby mammas and baby daddies somehow abound. Notions of romance and marriage and happily ever after are now widely regarded as quaintly old-fashioned, if not a dangerous relic of our repressively patriarchal past, and what’s left of the time-honored traditions of courtship are constantly interrupted by text messages.

Anecdotal evidence of this is so abundant that one cannot avoid it no matter how hard one tries to steer the party conversations to more pleasant topics, and all of the statistics from the social sciences and the advice columns of the more fashionable publications provide further confirmation. One notices it when scanning the radio dial or flipping through the television channels, too, as the senses are assaulted by all the jarring jeremiads against romance.

The biggest hit song in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War wasn’t a triumphant military march or a celebratory boogie-woogie but the quietly wistful yearning of “It’s Been a Long, Long Time,” done by a brooding Bing Crosby with the spare accompaniment of Les Paul’s elegant trio, but the anthem of today is a spiteful ditty with an unprintable title that was released to the underage crowd as “Forget You,” done with the full synthetic studio treatment by someone called Cee-Lo. Instead of Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse “Dancing in the Dark” through an idyllic Central Park, we now have crunking. Instead of “Casablanca” or “Stella Dallas,” where true love is expressed through heartbreaking acts of selflessness, we have endless “chick flicks” that countenance love only as an act of self-realization.

Some would argue that the hyper-romantic pop culture of the past was unrealistic, and perhaps they have a point. Hearing Johnny Mathis sing “Misty” always made us feel a bit earthbound, for instance, as even in the most love-addled moments of our youth we always knew our hat from our glove. This is probably a good thing, because one would look damned foolish wearing his gloves on his head with his hat wrapped around his hands, but even so we are still left wondering what it might feel like to be so fully enraptured. American culture used to nurture such romantic aspirations, rather than ridicule them, and at its best it could summon a far more realistic attitude than is found in contemporary music yet still be romantic. There’s a classic pop song that weds an ingeniously simple melody by Jerome Kern to Oscar Hammerstein’s plainspoken lyrics about a couple who marry, raise a family, then grow old together, all the time content to be known only as “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,” and it’s sadly difficult to imagine anyone in today’s celebrity-crazed and status-seeking culture settling for such a humble existence.

The consequences of such progress are found in the sad stories we regularly hear from friends and scant acquaintances, and can be seen on the bored faces of the bar patrons as they check their cellular telephones while trying to charm their way to another hook-up, but they can also be felt elsewhere in our civic life. Marital status is now one of the most reliable predictors of how people will vote, with the unmarried showing a marked preference for a big government that will provide the security and sense of belonging that have traditionally been found in marriage and family, and all of those Republican speeches about how the national debt will be passed on to the next generation are unlikely to persuade the childless single who is more interested in government-paid birth control. True love forever and ever might be fanciful, but it’s not nearly so unrealistic as the belief that a society raised by baby daddies and baby mommas will ever be as successful as one raised by husbands and wives.

Yet people still fall in love, we suppose, and perhaps some of them will even get married and raise children and be pleased to be known as the folks who live on the hill. We have no gift for song or cinema or poetry to encourage this tendency, but we will wish all of our readers a most happy Valentine’s Day.

— Bud Norman