I'm not going back on the road.'"Gonella was one of seven children. His father originally drove a hansom cab and then became one of the first of London's motorised taxi drivers. He died in 1915 when Gonella was six and his mother, unable to support their children, had to place him and a brother and sister in an orphanage. Gonella and another boy tried to escape but were held in a north London police station. The master who retrieved them made them first remove their braces.
They were marched back to the school with their hands in their pockets to keep their trousers up.Despite Gonella's disapproval of it, it was a good school with its own brass band. He joined the band when he was nine, as a drummer, but soon graduated to playing the cornet. His brother Bruts Gonella also played in the band and was later to join Nat Gonella's Georgians.Gonella suffered from rheumatic fever and had to spend six months in the school hospital. He was left with a weak heart that frustrated his attempt to join the army when he left the school. He became an errand boy until he saw in the Stage an advertisement calling for young brass players.A successful audition led to him switching to trumpet and joining Archie Pitt's Busby Boys, a touring band led by the husband of Gracie Fields. Gonella appeared with the group in a musical show A Week's Pleasure. Fields worked as a choreographer for the show.She and Gonella became friends and when she replaced her gramophone she gave Gonella her old one and with it his first jazz records, including one by the cornettist Bix Beiderbecke.
This was Gonella's introduction to jazz, and he soon began to find the Louis Armstrong records that were to change his life.A Week's Pleasure ran for two and a half years and when it finished Gonella toured for a further 18 months with another of Pitt's shows, Safety First. When the tour finished he joined a show band led by Bob Dryden, playing seasons in Margate, Manchester and Belfast before joining Billy Cotton's band in 1929 for a season at the Streatham Locarno dance hall. He made his first recordings with Cotton and also worked in the bands of Lew Stone, Roy Fox and Ray Noble and then formed his own band, the Georgians. He married his first wife, Betty, in 1930.Louis Armstrong came to Britain in July 1932 to play for two weeks at the London Palladium.
Gonella and his brother managed to hear every one of Armstrong's performances and it was then that Gonella's friendship with Armstrong began. In 1934 a record appeared on Decca described as Jazz Orchestra with Hot Trumpet. It was Gonella's first recording of Hoagy Carmichael's tune "Georgia on My Mind" and it became both an enduring hit and Gonella's signature tune, also providing him with the name for his band.The Georgians had begun as a small group within Lew Stone's big band, but it soon became a separate unit As such it made its debut at the Newcastle Empire in 1935. As Gonella's popularity burgeoned, he and the band played to full houses in theatres all over the country, broadcast regularly and made several film appearances, including Pity the Poor Rich (1935) and later, with the Mills Brothers, Sing As You Swing (1937).His version of "Tiger Rag" was a continuing hit and Parlophone used it on a trumpet tuition record they issued to tie in with Gonella's book Modern Style Trumpet Playing, published in 1935. He became established as the outstanding figure in British jazz and inspired a generation of musicians, including players like Humphrey Lyttelton. The Georgians toured in Holland at the end of the year and Gonella's popularity there was to last for the rest of his life.Most of the fan mail that he received was from female admirers, although a magazine feature on him called "The Girls Who Want To Marry Me" had nothing to do with the collapse of his marriage in 1936.
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