He was described as the "Perfect Knight" of Carnatic music, a phrase from Geoffrey Chaucer, by V. K. Narayana Menon, art critic of India and recipient of the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship.

[1] Narayanaswamy was born to Kollengode Viswanathayyar and Muthulakshmi Ammal in Palghat, Kerala, to a Palakkad Iyer family, a district renowned for its cultural and musical traditions, on 15 November 1923.

His great-grandfather Viswam Bhagavatar was renowned for his evocative Ashtapadis and rendered services for Maharaja Ayilyam Thirunal, ruler of the princely state of Travancore from 1860 to 1880.

Krishna Iyer, a highly competent vocalist, musicologist and composer in Palghat, and then under violinist and Sangeetha Kalanidhi Papa Venkataramaiah.

[3] Narayanaswamy's major break came at a Madras Music Academy concert in 1951, when he was unexpectedly forced to substitute for his guru, Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar who was not in a position to attend the conference under unforeseen circumstances.

This in turn would enable him to be at ease in the company of such legends of percussion as Palani Subramaniam Pillai, Palghat R. Raghu, Mavelikkara Velukkutty Nair, and Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman to name a few.

K.V.Narayanaswamy was intimately connected to the Travancore royal family following his skilful rendition of Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma's Navaratri compositions.

"The depth of emotion and the pathos he invested in singing certain compositions of Gopalakrishna Bharathi, especially VarugalAmo ayya and his incomparable and unique presentation of Krishna nee beganey in the style of Jayammal and Balasaraswati, in which he caressed the words and phrases exquisitely and had the audience in a trance as if he were a pied piper"[8] are noteworthy.

Some of Narayanaswamy's leading disciples were Padma Narayanaswamy (whom he married), vocalist K.V.Ananthan, violinist and vocalist Hemmige V. Srivatsan, renowned flautist Shashank Subramanyam, Padma Sandilyan, Padmasri Veeraraghavan, Hemmige S. Prashanth, Pattabhirama Pandit, Sathish Rao, M.R.Subramaniam, T. S. Ranganathan, Manipallavam K.Sarangan, Balaji Prasad Krishnamurthy, Ravi Srinivasan, Navneet Krishnan, B. Raman and Ramanujan.