Nate Dogg

Nathaniel Dwayne Hale was born on the nineteenth of August 1969 at Clarksdale, Mississippi, the youngest of three children of Daniel Lee Hale — a Pentecostal minister and gospel choir director — and Ruth Hale, a homemaker. The family moved to Long Beach, California, when Nathaniel was an infant. His father became across the 1970s and 1980s a senior pastor at multiple Long Beach Pentecostal congregations and conducted concurrently across the 1970s the family gospel group the Innerfaith Gospel Singers, in which Nathaniel sang from his sixth year.

He attended Long Beach Polytechnic High School through the eleventh grade and left in 1986 to enlist in the United States Marine Corps. He served the Marines from 1986 to 1989 at Camp Lejeune and at Okinawa. He returned to Long Beach on his discharge and met Calvin Broadus — subsequently known as Snoop Dogg — and his cousin Warren G at the new East Side recording network of Long Beach.

The three formed in 1990 the trio 213 — named for the Long Beach area code — and across the next two years produced demonstration recordings that brought them to the attention of Andre Young (Dr. Dre) at Death Row Records. He contributed his first major vocal performances to the December 1992 Dr. Dre album The Chronic — including Deeez Nuuuts and Lil' Ghetto Boy — and to the November 1993 Snoop Dogg album Doggystyle. His distinctive Pentecostal-derived high-baritone vocal hook style established him as the principal vocal voice of the West Coast G-funk synthesis between East-Coast hip-hop and West-Coast post-Parliament-Funkadelic instrumentation.

He contributed across the following fifteen years guest vocal performances on an estimated four hundred recordings — making him the most-featured guest vocalist of 1990s and 2000s hip-hop. The principal performances include Warren G's Regulate (1994), 2Pac's All Bout U (1996), Eminem's 'Till I Collapse (2002) and 50 Cent's 21 Questions (2003).

He suffered two successive strokes in late 2007 and late 2008 that produced partial paralysis and impaired speech. He died of complications of the strokes at Long Beach on the fifteenth of March 2011, at forty-one.

He is honored here as the principal vocal voice of West Coast G-funk.