Some critics consider Nat King Cole’s Every Time I Feel the Spirit recording to be one of his strangest, but a quick glimpse into his personal history shows that creating a gospel-themed album would have been a natural extension of his history.
Cole was the son of a preacher man, Edward James Coles. When Nat was born, his father was a grocer. His great desire wasn’t just to sell goods at a store, though. He wanted to preach the word of the Lord. A few years after Nat’s birth, Edward uprooted the family out of Alabama and moved to Chicago. After a year or two of hard work, Edward joined the Truelight Baptist Church and began his life’s work. As a result, Edward’s wife and his children were an integral part in church services and all of the kids, at one time or another, played organ for the choir.
So in a way, Every Time I Feel the Spirit is a return to Nat’s musical birth. The songs found on this recording were certainly familiar from his time with his father’s congregation at church. The album also had some geographical significance as Cole is joined by the First Church of Deliverance choir based out of, you guessed it, Chicago. In addition to that, the whole album was recorded in the church.
This album is unique because it sounds like nothing else Cole ever recorded. Some of the Cole fixtures are present, however, like the choice of Gordon Jenkins as the musical director. While Jenkins was mostly known for delivering graceful strings and expansive arrangements, on this album he served mainly as a conductor and worked with arrangements based mainly around piano, organ, bass, and drums with an emphasis on that good ol’ snare.
Most of the songs are traditional spirituals, save for one (“I Found the Answer” was a Johnny Lange tune). The choir is noisy and energetic, sometimes overly so, and it often seems as though Cole and the backing vocals don’t mesh too well together. In effect, that’s part of this album’s appeal. Musically, this is a flamboyant exhibition of foot-stompin’ spirituals. To fans of Nat King Cole’s more inconspicuous work, Every Time I Feel the Spirit will come as a surprise.
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