Tuning In

Imagine how wonderful it must be to hear, "Honey I love this one. It's really good." Those are those are the words of Father Pink whenever his pop songstress daughter needs pre-release assurance. Amid the storms of the music world, her comfort comes from knowing, "[Dad] doesn't preach to me how I could make it better. He just likes it."

Now consider how different the situation of children who have to learn who their father was through his music and what others tell you of his life. Such is the situation for 12-year-old Christopher Wallace Jr., son of Notorious B.I.G./Biggie Smalls, who will play his father in an upcoming biopic. The large-boned rapper was assassinated when his son was four months old.

That killing was more dramatic in terms of biography than the lung cancer that killed Nat King Cole at age 45 in 1965, but not in terms of impact, stealing him from his then three-and-a-half-year-old twins. Unlike Biggie Jr., the Coles have memories of the father they lost, although the mists of time might have spiced them somewhat, at least as told by daughter Casey: "...when he would walk into the house he would carry both of us up the stairs in the palm of his hands, and he would like be singing a song." And in his memory they want that song to carry on through their foundation, Nat King Cole Generation Hope Foundation, that they established to honor him and aid music education in schools.

Still, dead or alive, the music lives. And when it does, so does the father through the child.