Singer was widow of Nat King Maria Cole dies at 89

Maria Cole, widow of the legendary musician Nat King Cole and the mother of singer Natalie Cole on her own singing career includes a stint as a vocalist for Duke Ellington Orchestra in mid 1940, has died. He was 89 years.

Col. died on Tuesday at a hospice in Boca Raton, Florida, after a brief battle with cancer, his family said.

"Our mother was in a class by itself," his daughters said in a joint statement. "He synthesized class, elegance, and truly defines what it means to be a real lady."

Born in Boston, she performed as opening act of the Mills Brothers Club Zanzibar in New York when he met the singer and pianist Nat Cole. They married in 1948 in Harlem.

"I was very involved in his life," he told the Boston Globe in 1989. "I'm busy with his agent. I kept the books. I was there for all the wonderful moments of your life, the awards. The shared everything. I joined his life."

The Coles, the purchase of a building in an exclusive, all white neighborhood of Hancock Park in Los Angeles in 1948, stimulated by owners protest, has traveled across Europe together in 1950 a time when Mary, resumed a singing career and recorded several songs with her husband for Capitol Records.

Nat Cole, successes include "Unforgettable" and "Mona Lisa" and the 1956-57 television series wide musical "'King Col Nat The Show" was the first television network presented by an African-American died of lung cancer in 1965.

After his death, Mary Col Col establish the Cancer Foundation and returned to his singing career, beginning with an essay in the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas in late 1966 and followed by an appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show. "

He also began to co-host an evening of live interviews with Stan Bohrman and varieties of KHJ-TV (Channel 9) in Los Angeles in 1967. Two years later, he married the writer and television producer Gary I devour. The couple divorced in 1978.

In 1990, Natalie Cole and her daughter accepted a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award for her late husband.

"I miss the closeness of my marriage to Nat," said Cole in a 1989 Boston Globe. "I liked to hear the key in the door. I loved the preparation of their meals. I liked being married to him."

The daughter of a postal employee, Mary Hawkins was born on 1 August 1922. He was 2 when her mother died in childbirth and his father stayed to care for her three daughters.

Cole, who took voice and piano lessons during his childhood, he studied at the Palmer Memorial Institute, a prestigious American prep school founded by her aunt to African Sedalia, North Carolina

After graduating in 1938, attended college in the Boston office and began singing with a jazz band at night. He soon moved to New York and began singing with Benny Carter's band jazz.

In 1943, he married Spurgeon Ellington, one of the Tuskegee airmen, who was killed during a routine training flight shortly after the end of World War II.