‘Everlasting Love’ Singer Natalie Cole Dies of Heart Failure

According to her family, Cole died of complications from ongoing health issues.

Natalie’s mother was the late singer Maria Hawkins Cole.

Another father-daughter duet, “When I Fall in Love”, won a 1996 Grammy for best pop collaboration with vocals, and a follow-up album, “Still Unforgettable”, won for best traditional pop vocal album of 2008.

Singer Natalie Cole, famous for such hits as “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)”, died Thursday night at 65.

Yet over a long career, Cole recorded a broad selection of material, including Tin Pan Alley staples, songs written for her and songs by, among others, Fiona Apple and Bruce Springsteen. As a young woman, she had listened to Franklin and Janis Joplin and for years was reluctant to perform her father’s material. “We were doing it for a great mutual love of that kind of music”, Foster says about Cole’s tribute album to her father, legendary jazz singer Nat King Cole. The song and the album garnered several Grammy awards for Natalie Cole.

She was first nominated for numerous Grammy Awards in 1976 and has been a constant contestant for the honour over the years.

Cole was set to make her Broadway debut in 2014 as a guest star in Warren Carlyle’s After Midnight, following in the footsteps of Fantasia Barrino, Vanessa Williams, and Patti LaBelle, from August 5-31. She was arrested on heroin possession charges in 1975 and sought treatment for drug addiction in the ’80s.

Cole went to rehab in 1983 and told the Inquirer that her recovery is a “day-to-day process”.

The singer released twenty three studio albums during her lifetime, in which seven ranked gold and four ranked platinum in the United States.

The year 2000 saw Cole playing herself in a made-for-TV biopic. “She represented the Cole legend of excellence and class quite well”. Just listen to her stratospheric, 11th-hour wailing in the final choruses of 1977’s “I’ve Got Love on My Mind”. The same morning, her sister, Cookie, passed away from cancer.

She underwent a kidney transplant in 2009, which inspired her second book. “Instead of 90-minute shows, maybe I’ll only do 60”.

“I don’t know what I was thinking”, Cole wrote of the divorce.

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson was among those paying tribute to Natalie Cole.

Fly Me To The Moon singer Tony Bennett also took to Instagram to express his upset after hearing the sad news.

He is filled with “profound sadness” at the loss of his friend, who he trusted “with secrets I wouldn’t tell anyone else”. “She was a lovely and generous person who will be greatly missed”.

Among her many accomplishments is her involvement with the Afghan World Foundation cause, a non-profit organization providing support for the expansion of educational, economical and medical advancement in Afghanistan. We shall never forget her defiant rendition of “Pink Cadillac” at the London concert in celebration of our former president Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday in 1988 at a time when he was still in prison and when apartheid repression was still at its height.