[2] His father was a Methodist lay preacher and metalsmith by trade; his mother's family were of Irish Protestant origin.

[3] He was educated at Blackpool Grammar School, and won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he gained an honours degree (2:1) in English.

He was heavily involved in the arts, was editor of Granta, and set up the Mummers, Cambridge's first theatre group open to both sexes, from which he notably rejected a young James Mason, telling him to stick to architecture.

Each week, he recorded a 15-minute radio dialogue for American listeners on life in Britain, under the series title of London Letter.

During the crisis, he was aided by a twenty-year-old Rhodes Scholar, Walt Rostow, who would become Lyndon B. Johnson's national security advisor.

[8] Cooke stated that, on a visit to New York in 1936, he'd been impressed at how freely newspapers and journals were able to report on the abdication crisis whilst all comment was still censored in London.

He became a United States citizen and swore the Oath of Allegiance on 1 December 1941, six days before Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Shortly after immigrating, Cooke suggested to the BBC the idea of doing the London Letter in reverse: a 15-minute talk for British listeners on life in America.

During this time, as well, Cooke undertook a journey through the whole United States, recording the lifestyle of ordinary Americans during the war and their reactions to it.

The first American Letter was broadcast on 24 March 1946 (Cooke said this was at the request of Lindsey Wellington, the BBC's New York Controller); the series was initially commissioned for only 13 instalments.

It featured appearances by such personalities as Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Gene Kelly and Leonard Bernstein.

[citation needed] On 2 March 2004, at the age of 95, following advice from his doctors, Cooke announced his retirement from Letter from America—after 58 years, the longest-running speech radio show in the world.

[20] On 22 December 2005, the New York Daily News reported that several of Cooke's bones, and those of many other people, had been surgically removed before cremation by employees of Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, New Jersey, a tissue-recovery firm.

Cooke was reportedly happy to accept, because in the words of Thomas Jefferson, it did not involve "the very great vanity of a title.

The album features Cooke playing jazz standards on piano with accompanying whistle and speaking about his life in America.