The Strangest Hit Songwriter in History
He wrote one of my favorite songs, but was so much more than a composer
Today Eden Ahbez would get called a one-hit wonder.
That’s how the music business mocks artists who enjoy a brief taste of fame—a short stay on the chart followed by a lifetime of obscurity.
In Ahbez’s case, his hit was “Nature Boy.” This odd song, released as a single by Nat King Cole on March 29, 1948, sold a million copies and climbed to the top of the Billboard chart.
Industry insiders were astonished. Many dismissed “Nature Boy” as a bizarre novelty song. Perhaps that was understandable—there was no other hit tune like it back then (or now). But the word novelty doesn’t do justice to the poetic and philosophical tone of the lyrics, or the art song quality of the music.
But all the usual labels fall short when applied to Eden Ahbez—including that derogatory term one-hit wonder. You would do better to call Ahbez a guru or a mystic. Frankly, I consider him the first hippie, an advocate for a lifestyle that didn’t even exist when he rose to fame.
By any measure, he is the least likely hit songwriter of his era. Or perhaps any era.
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The story behind “Nature Boy” is as unique as its composer.
In May 1947, Nat King Cole had just performed to a capacity crowd at the Lincoln Theater in Los Angeles, when a strange man came to the stage door. He had long, flowing hair, an unruly beard, and was wearing a toga-like outfit. He insisted that he needed to see Nat King Cole.
“That guy I talked to is a genius or a nut.”
This unkempt man was Eden Ahbez, but he never got a chance to see Cole that day. Instead he only got as far as the singer’s valet, Otis Pollard—who sent the visitor packing. But before leaving, Ahbez thrust a tattered piece of music—the score for “Nature Boy”—into Pollard’s hands.
Pollard returned to Cole, and remarked: “The guy I talked to is a genius or a nut.”
Cole was intrigued and took the song. After humming through the melody, he was struck by its expressive quality. And the lyrics were even more surprising—they never even use the phrase “nature boy,” which is the song’s title. Instead they espouse a kind of metaphysics of natural living.
It starts out as a story song—probably about Ahbez himself. But it’s told in the third person. The lyrics begin:
There was a boy.
A very strange enchanted boy….
And the song ends, twenty bars later, by sharing cosmic advice with the listener:
The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved in return.
Okay, it’s unconventional, but this is one of my favorite songs. Back when I worked daily on songwriting, I aspired to merging music and a higher philosophy—and “Nature Boy” was a role model for me.
I’ve even recorded it, uncharacteristically insisting on performing both piano and vocal.
The words are simple enough, but critics have endlessly debated what they really mean. Are they Ahbez’s autobiography? Are they a lifestyle guide? Are they a spiritual invocation?
Novelist Steve Erickson tried to summarize the meaning of “Nature Boy,” and came up with this:
“All thousand and one Arabian Nights compressed into two and a half minutes as mediated by a cracked Mojave Debussy slugging down the last of the absinthe from his canteen.”
Cole didn’t know quite what to make of it, but he tried “Nature Boy” out in front of an audience at his next Hollywood gig—at the Bocage on Sunset Boulevard. From the start, Ahbez’s haunting song captured listeners’ attention.
Songwriting legend Irving Berlin heard one of the first performances, and was so struck by “Nature Boy” that he tried to buy the rights. But Cole decided to record it himself—even though “Nature Boy” was quite a departure from the jaunty, swing tunes and love ballads that were his specialty.
There was a small problem. Cole didn’t own the song himself, and nobody knew how to get the rights.
Capitol Records needed to find the composer, and get his permission. But like a true nature boy, Eden Ahbez preferred natural living—he had written the song while living in a cave!—and didn’t have a permanent address.
During this period, Ahbez lived on three dollars per week, and slept outdoors. His diet was fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Sometimes he studied Asian mysticism. At other times, he would hold his handmade bamboo flutes up into the air, and let the passing breezes play their own nature music.
Good luck finding him.
When the record label eventually tracked down Eden Ahbez, he was living under the first L in the Hollywood Sign, high above the city. He happily granted Cole the right to record his song.
The honchos at Capitol Records actually hated “Nature Boy.”
The song was just too weird. Music fans wouldn’t know what to do with it. They might even ridicule it. Cole’s reputation could suffer
Capitol only released it because the musicians union went to war against record labels in 1948. This prevented Capitol from making new tracks—so they had to issue old stuff lying around. One of those abandoned songs was “Nature Boy,” recorded at a marathon session several months before the ban went into effect.
The record created a sensation from the moment it hit the airwaves. When it first got played on the radio, at WNEW on March 22, 1948, the station got overwhelmed with phone calls within minutes of its airing. Everybody wanted to know more about “Nature Boy.”
This song had a transformative impact on Cole’s career. He later singled it out as one of his personal favorites. Its huge crossover success helped him decide to leave his King Cole Trio jazz combo behind and focus on a solo career as vocalist. His fame grew larger and larger as a result.
But the opposite happened to Eden Ahbez.
Our nature boy was not well suited for celebrity life. His destiny was to seek and wander, not arrive.
Ahbez had traveled much since his birth in 1908, in Brooklyn, as George Aberle. He spent much of his childhood in an orphanage. After his adoption in 1917, he was raised in Kansas with the new name George McGrew.
He played piano in Kansas City. But from there he hitchhiked and rambled—eventually ending up in Hollywood. That’s a great place to launch a music career, but Ahbez did everything in an eccentric way.
While others in Hollywood might aim for the Palladium, Ahbez opted instead for the Eutropheon—a raw foods restaurant which operated as if fire hadn’t yet been discovered. Here our longhaired nomad made mystical music while patrons dined on uncooked soup, unbaked bread, and unfired pies.
In the aftermath of his success with “Nature Boy,” Ahbez could aim higher. He started writing songs for other singers. Some of the biggest stars, from Doris Day to Sam Cooke, recorded his music.
The latter’s rendition of Ahbez’s “Lonely Island” made a brief appearance in the top forty, but that would be the last time on the chart for our non-conforming composer.
Ahbez allegedly wrote some 300 songs. But most of this music is simply too eccentric for the mainstream.
Consider these song titles, and try to imagine their hit potential—or lack thereof:
“Real Gone Yogi” (1948)
“India” (1951)
“Zen” (1956)
“Dharmaland” (1961)
“Siddhartha” (1978)
“Jerusalem” (1978)
“The World Has Been Born Again” (1980)
When Ahbez performed in public, he would play bongos or flute or recite beatnik poetry—all of it quite striking, but hardly a launching pad for crossover success.
Ahbez finally made his debut album in 1960. This record, Eden’s Island, was a full-fledged hippie spectacle. A few years later, it could have been a perfect soundtrack for the psychedelic Summer of Love. But you get punished for being too far ahead of your time.
For straightlaced Americans of the Eisenhower era, Eden Island was just a joke—much like the beatnik character Maynard G. Krebs (possibly inspired by Ahbez) on the then popular sitcom Dobie Gillis.
When the hippie movement finally arrived, Ahbez was almost sixty—hardly an icon for a generation that boasted “you can’t trust anyone over thirty.” He would never release another album during his lifetime.
But Ahbez still lingered in the margins of the counterculture.
We find hints of him in all sorts of strange places. The British folk-rock star Donovan tracked Ahbez down in Palm Springs, and claimed to have had a “near-telepathic” encounter with the guru. And a stray photo finds Ahbez sitting next to Brian Wilson at one of the sessions for the legendary Smile album.
Tom Waits met the composer when he was hitchhiking in SoCal one day in 1972:
“I got picked up by a guy in an old Volkswagen bus—long hair, beads over the rear-view mirror swinging back and forth—and he picked me up and dropped me off about a quarter of a mile up the road.”
The driver introduced himself as Eden Ahbez, composer of “Nature Boy.” This was exciting for Waits, who was at the outset of his career and hadn’t met many hit songwriters.
There was just one problem: “He dropped me off somewhere that was worse than the one where he picked me up.”
That could describe the entire trajectory of Ahbez’s music career, which continued to evolve—but each step taking him to a worse place in the changing music world.
In the 1970s, he changed his name one more time, to Eden Abba. He continued to spend time in the recording studio, working with ambient music producer Joe Romersa. He hoped to finish his final work, a magnum opus entitled Scripture of the Golden Age.
Ahbez believed this would be his most important contribution to society, but we can only speculate on what the master tapes contain. For the most part, the final quarter century of Ahbez’s life is undocumented, hidden from the view of even his most devoted fans.
Ahbez died in 1995, after injuries from an auto accident. He was 86 years old. In his obituary, the Los Angeles Times focused on his hit “Nature Boy” from 1948, and explained that afterwards Ahbez “retreated into relative obscurity.”
I’d like to tell you what the New York Times said. But they didn’t run an obituary for Eden Ahbez—he simply didn’t register in their world.
The song itself hasn’t gone away, and sometimes shows up in unexpected places.
And I’ve noticed encouraging signs of a posthumous revival, at least in some circles. Undated work on Echoes from Nature Boy came out in 1995. In 2016, Brian Chidester oversaw the release of Wild Boy (The Lost Songs Of Eden Ahbez), and in 2021 served as producer for Dharmaland (which I reviewed at The Honest Broker)—a celebration of Ahbez’s music performed by Swedish band Ìxtahuele, and drawing on unrecorded sheet music from the early 1960s. Chidester has also done important biographical research on the composer.
But these efforts run against the grain of our forgetful music culture, so I doubt we will ever find the way back to our original Eden. For most of those in the music business, Ahbez is remembered, if at all, as a curio, an anomaly, or—that cursed term—one-hit wonder.
This unusual man deserves better. Maybe we should just call him a wonder, and not limit it to one hit, no matter how glorious.
During the turbulent middle decades of the twentieth century, Eden Ahbez wondrously anticipated the future better than almost anyone. He invented an alternative lifestyle that isn’t even alternative anymore. And he espoused a worldview and way of life that invited ridicule, but have held up quite well with the passing years.
I can’t say it any better than he did. So I’ll let Eden Ahbez have the last word:
The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love—and be loved in return.
On one level, Ted, your post is about a guy who composed a timeless song a long time ago. On a higher level, it is a master class in how to write a Substack post. When I start my Substack soon, I hope to someday write something half as interesting. I might fail, but at least you have shown how it’s done. Great post!
Such a cool story and I love your version!