incandescent blue <die-blaue-***@hyacinthine.net> wrote:
>On 2005-05-14, John Hatpin <***@nowhere.com> wrote:
>>
>>>As given names "Duke" barely registers there and "Count" doesn't
>>>show up at all, but "Prince" shows up earlier and more often than
>>>you might expect:
>>>http://www.thenamemachine.com/baby-names-boys/Prince.html
>>
>> Isn't there a boxer called Prince Naheem or something? Maybe that's
>> the reason for most of the recent Princes.
>
>Hmmm. Prince Naseem, per Google's handy correction. But his career
>doesn't match up perfectly with those graphs; on their hundred-year
>scoring, "Prince" vanishes from the chart after 1940 and only reappears
>around 1980 before vanishing again. Mr. Hamed's boxing career didn't
>start until the early 1990s. Perhaps his nickname is an influence
>on that 1990-2003 recent popularity chart, but that big spike in the
>1980s seems more likely to be related to the Purple One being at the
>height of his popularity.
Yeah, gotcha. You're most probably right.
>>>Ah, but don't forget his band was the King Cole Trio, founded
>>>in 1937, even though he didn't start charting as a vocalist until
>>>the 1940s.
>>
>> Didn't know that. I thought the "King" thing was a commercial
>> decision, and didn't start until he was being promoted as a singer.
>
>Hmmm. The dates from the Nat King Cole Society page may not be giving
>the whole story: http://highstreets.co.uk/kcc/html/biograph.htm
>says the trio started out with the name "King Cole Swingsters" and
>then "King Cole and His Swing Trio" before finally settling on
>"King Cole Trio" in '39. (Same lineup, though.) But he was definitely
>associated with that nickname from the earliest days of having his
>own jazz band, years before the lush-strings-pop-crooner phase.
It's just occurred to me that maybe the dropping of the "King" bit was
retrospective - jazzers wanted to distinguish the old King Cole (heh!)
who was cool from the newer version who was seriously uncool. That's
a cool Cole categorisation concept (sorry, it's that Carson sketch in
my head again).
Then again, jazz writers often drop nicknames, so Harry "Sweets"
Edison is usually referred to as plain "Harry Edison" in the texts.
Maybe that's why we get "Nat Cole".
Incidentally, I was fortunate enough to meet Harry Edison, and he was
a warm, charming, down-to-earth and extremely witty man, as well as a
superlative musician. But I digress.
--
John Hatpin