Eden Ahbez: The Original Nature Boy

The forgotten songwriter who lived under the Hollywood sign

A good decade ago, I discovered a recording on YouTube that made my armhair stand up and my eyes swell with tears.

The song was “Nature Boy” – a well-known jazz standard, first recorded by Nat King Cole in 1948 and covered by dozens of artists over the following decades, from Frank Sinatra to Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan to Tony Bennett, George Benson to David Bowie.

This was an acapella recording, just one minute and 17 seconds long, with loads of background static. It captivated me more than any version I’d ever heard, but it seemed impossible to find out who the singer actually was.

In the YouTube comments, someone wrote that it sounded like a young Chet Baker. Someone else speculated it could be Pat Boone.

Others were sure the mysterious, haunting voice belonged to the original songwriter, a long-haired and bearded man called Eden Ahbez.

The story of Eden Ahbez is one of the strangest artist biographies I’ve ever encountered.

Born George Alexander Aberle in Brooklyn, New York City, in 1908, he grew up in a Jewish orphan asylum. At the age of eight, he was adopted by a family of Kansas farmers and raised under a new name: George McGrew.

In Kansas, he went to school and took piano lessons. When the boy turned 14, he ran away from home. He slept outside and jumped on freight trains, crossing the U.S. like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road – a book that wouldn’t arrive until 25 years later.

In the 1930s, McGrew lived in Kansas City, performing as a pianist and leading a dance band. Not much is known about this period of his life.

When he came to Los Angeles in 1941, he was 33. There he met a couple who ran a health food store and raw food restaurant inspired by the Lebensreform movement.

Since the mid-19th century, Lebensreformers lived off the grid in Germany and Switzerland. They were opposed to industrialization and urbanization, and searched for a lifestyle in unity with nature. They were early spiritual precursors to both the beatniks and the hippies, occupying themselves with Eastern philosophy, yoga and veganism.

In L.A., McGrew became part of a small group of people who were inspired by that movement, known as the “Nature Boys”. He gave himself a new name, eden ahbez – which he always wrote in lowercase letters, because he believed uppercase letters should be reserved for God and Infinity.

He often played piano at that health food shop and restaurant; with his blonde locks, long beard and flowing robes, Ahbez looked and dressed like Jesus – or like a hippie, long before hippies existed.

In 1947, he waited in front of a L.A. theatre. He wanted to give a song to Nat King Cole, but Cole’s manager wasn’t interested; Ahbez handed the notes sheet to his valet instead, who eventually passed it along to his boss.

When Cole looked at the song a few days later, he loved the poetic, melancholic undertones of Yiddish folk, and he tested the tune at some of his next gigs. When people’s reactions were overwhelmingly positive, he wanted to record it, but nobody knew where to find the songwriter.

Weeks passed until someone found Ahbez. At the time, he was living with his wife Anna Jacobson, whom he’d married the previous year. They slept under the open sky or in caves, mostly in the area of Tujunga Canyon, north of Los Angeles. For a while, they sheltered under one of the L’s of the Hollywood sign. They didn’t own more than the clothes on their bodies, sleeping bags, towels, some plates, knives and bikes.

Unexperienced as he was, Ahbez agreed to a deal that signed over 87,5% of his rights to Cole and his people. After all, the music business was a trench of decaying sh*t, long before Steve Albini said so.

Capitol released Cole’s version of “Nature Boy” in March 1948. The tune went straight to number one on the charts, stayed there for six weeks and sold a million copies in the first month. For Cole, it was a breakthrough hit with white audiences.

The story of the homeless songwriter felt exciting – the press wanted interviews and photo shootings; Ahbez even received offers for advertising deals. In a TV show, he said: “‘Nature Boy’ is really the story of my life.”

Ahbez wasn’t interested in money or fame though. He played his part in the game for a short while, then disappeared from the public eye.

In October of that same year, Anna gave birth to their son Zoma. The family lived off the grid in Tujunga, growing their own food.

Even under his bad deal, Ahbez had earned a large sum from the hit song – at least large for someone who claimed to live off $3 per week.

In 1951, Yiddish performer Herman Yablokoff sued Ahbez, claiming that “Nature Boy” was plagiarized from one of his songs. Ahbez spoke to him on the phone, saying that he’d heard angels sing the melody to him in his dreams. They settled out of court, with Ahbez paying $25,000 to Yablokoff.

In the next years, Ahbez would use the proceeds from “Nature Boy” to book a music studio every now and then, with the purpose of recording some of his new songs. Most of the time though, he’d just argue with the engineers.

Released in 1960, Eden’s Island remains the outsider’s only published musical work. It’s a concept album about a utopian society on an island far removed from the Western world, featuring spoken and sung poetry over exotica-style instrumentation and otherworldly sound effects. One of the main instruments on the record is Ahbez’ wooden flute.

The album is said to have influenced the birth of psychedelic music in the early to mid-1960s. Apparently there’s a photo of Ahbez with Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys dating back to 1967, the year when one of their most experimental albums, Smiley Smile, was released.

However, Eden’s Island was widely ignored by the public upon release, selling just 500 copies. The album was re-released in the late 2010s and found new appreciation from psychedelic music lovers around the globe.

After the initial release, tragedy struck in Ahbez’ life: His wife Anna died from cancer in 1963, then later in the decade, his son Zoma died unexpectedly too. The former “Nature Boy”, now in his 50s, became even more of a hermit and a recluse.

In Los Angeles, people would still occasionally see him out in the streets over the next decades. Reportedly living in Sunland now, an area west of Tujunga, he was still writing and recording music but never released anything; some of these recordings came to light posthumously.

In 1995, Eden Ahbez passed away from injuries following a car accident in Palm Strings. He was 86 and more or less forgotten by then, but “Nature Boy” had become a true jazz standard, recorded hundreds of times, in dozens of languages.

I still don’t know if it’s really him singing that YouTube version. It’s a beautiful thought.

Someone in the comments claims it’s not an old but a recent recording, made to sound old, by a contemporary singer-songwriter called Iron & Wine.

I don’t want to believe it.