Of K-Tel Ads and Nat King Cole

I first heard of Nat King Cole when I was a small boy watching cartoons on TV. Or, rather, when I was a small boy wishing that the K-Tel commercial would wind up so that I could back to watching cartoons on TV. You remember those ads? There’d be a crawl of song names going up the screen as snippets of different songs played and the announcer explained how you could get all of these great hits for next to nothing. To this day there are songs that I find instantly recognizable despite never having heard more than three or four seconds of them.

Nat King Cole figured in one or more of these collections, and there are phrases from “Unforgettable” and “Mona Lisa” that I will never, ever be able to eradicate from my head. And because of them, I took rather a dislike to Nat King Cole, because “Unforgettable” and “Mona Lisa” are long, slow, and boring. I found the brief snippets boring as a boy, and I confess the full songs don’t do anything for me now.

But recently I’ve been running into other, more upbeat songs by Mr. Cole, and I find I’m liking them. Here’s one in particular, light and cheerful, that he turns into something special.