Interest in ahbez was rekindled when Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett included “Nature Boy” on their 2014 collaboration Cheek to Cheek. In comparison, Sun Ra’s off-kilter account on the 1977 album Some Blues but not the Kind that’s Blue is almost tranquil. Saxophonist John Coltrane turned it into an instrumental lament on 1965 album The John Coltrane Quartet Plays in the same year, Grace Slick’s rough and ready reading brought it to the attention of the counter-culture. A David Bowie version is included on the soundtrack of the 2001 film Moulin Rouge!Ī separate strand drew on the song’s spiritual message. Frank Sinatra had an early hit with choral backing rock and roll crooner Bobby Darin charted with it in 1961, and British soul-funk band Central Line performed it on the BBC’s Top of the Pops in 1983. Others chose “Nature Boy” for its commercial appeal. Included in this strand is the orchestral version that leads off Marvin Gaye’s 1965 Nat King Cole tribute album, and George Benson’s slinky, soulful version on the 1977 album In Flight.
Yet his version of “Nature Boy” was a bridgehead across a racially divided America - something later versions recognised. The composer and Yiddish theatre star Herman Yablokoff accused ahbez of appropriating “Nature Boy” from his own song “Shvayg Mayn Harts” (“Be Still My Heart”) ahbez, though insisting that the tune had come to him in the California mountains, settled out of court.Ĭole, meanwhile, had to wear skin-lightening make-up to perform the song on television, and burning crosses were erected outside his new home in a white LA neighbourhood. It also made an unlikely celebrity of ahbez, who, interviewed in 1948 on Chicago radio show We the People, pronounced: “I was born with a love of nature and I was born with the desire to find God.”īut trouble was in the offing. Cole’s shelved version of “Nature Boy” got its turn in March 1948 and chalked up 1m sales, establishing Cole’s solo career. It was released only because the American Federation of Musicians entered a lengthy dispute, banning all instrumental recording, so that labels were forced to draw on work that was already in the bag. He was found camping with his wife and child below one of the Ls of the Hollywood sign.Ĭole recorded “Nature Boy” for Capitol in August 1947 but the label thought the song wayward and shelved it. Cole immediately included it in his trio’s repertoire but needed ahbez’s permission for recording. But a crumpled manuscript did eventually reach the singer, reputedly slipped to his valet. When ahbez tried to present the manuscript to Cole, he was rebuffed.
“And the funny thing is that other people don’t look crazy, but they are.”
“I look crazy, but I’m not,” he told Life magazine in 1948.