Natalie Cole had many ties to Chicago, on and off the stage

The musical icon was a pre-med student at the University of MA when a friend – who was singing with a local group – fell ill and asked Natalie to fill in for him after hearing her singing at parties. “I was a heroin addict, sharing needles with the crowd I was with”, she herself admitted to People magazine in 2008. “You can go through turbulent times and still have victory in your life”.

“Natalie fought a fierce, courageous battle, dying how she lived… with dignity, strength and honour”, Cole’s family said in a statement.

After her visit, the pair maintained a relationship, one so personal that Sichko said he secretly went to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for tests to see if he could donate a kidney to an ailing Cole. “With Love” in 1991, leaping back to a previous generation’s songs, that Cole would establish her latter-day career.

Cole showed a world so cold to the idea of having a minority in media that it was possible and wonderful, and silenced all the haters by her lovely voice. As she grew up without her father’s guidance, Cole never abandoned music. Yet she was about to find her own voice.

In her autobiography, Cole narrated how she struggled with depression, most painfully after the death of her father and the near-drowning of her son in a swimming pool.

Cole recorded her first album in 1975 and quickly found success.

Although criticized by some as morbid, the album sold some 14 million copies and won six Grammys, including album of the year as well record and song of the year for the title track duet. The other two, Thankful and Unpredictable, were both released in 1977.

But she was soon singing in clubs – though she resisted singing her father’s material.

“We had no idea of the magnitude of the personalities around us”, she wrote in her memoir, “Angel On My Shoulder” (2000), co-authored with Digby Diehl. In 1983, drug addiction led Cole to spend a few months at the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota. Natalie had traveled with her father to Mexico and Europe in the ’50s, and a trip to Mexico when she was 8 inspired the 2013 album Natalie Cole En Español, which includes another posthumous father-daughter duet, “Acércate Mas”. For more than 20 years, she refused to cover her fathers songs, but in the end, it was her celebration of his music together with her angelic voice that will live on in our hearts forever.

In 2008 she was diagnosed with the hepatitis C virus, which Cole said was a legacy of her time abusing drugs.

Cole’s ace in the hole was the fact she really could sing. During a March 2009 appearance on Larry King Live, her fans’ love for her was apparent. She won dozens of awards too. Cole received dialysis three times a week, but continued to perform.

“To have your life saved by someone you don’t even know – oh, God”.

“I’m an ex-drug addict and I don’t take that kind of stuff lightly”, Cole explained at the 2009 Grammy Awards.