This page was created by Maxwell Gontarek.  The last update was by David Squires.

Keys to the Archive: A Lesson Before Dying

Nature Boy

By Maxwell Gontarek

Title: "Nature Boy"
Artist: Nat King Cole
Year: 1948
Genre: Vocal
Label: Capitol Records

There was a boy,
A very strange, enchanted boy.
They say he wandered very far,
Very far over land and sea.
A little shy and sad of eye
But very wise was he.

And then one day,
One magic day, he passed my way.
While we spoke of many things,
Fools and kings,
This he said to me:

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn
is just to love and be loved in return."


Released a little over a year before Jefferson's execution date on the second Friday after Easter 1949, "Nature Boy" was an unlikely hit for pianist and vocalist Nat King Cole, at once the most polarizing and preeminent musical figure of his generation. Capitol Records (sometimes referred to as "The House That Nat Built") shelved the recording originally, viewing it as too thematically and formally unusual for mainstream success. When they released the song, desperate for new releases during a union ban on recording, its popularity solidified Cole's solo career apart from The King Cole Trio.

However, the song's composition has a mythos all its own and has been a subject of storied debate. According to a 1948 exposé in Life Magazine, the song was written by eden ahbez, a bohemian who stylized his self-given name in all lowercase letters for spiritual reasons and spent his time in the California mountains, deserts, and canyons surrounding Los Angeles.

There is not much credible information beyond this interview and a 1948 appearance alongside Cole on the show We the People on CBS, and even these seem somewhat stilted. (Some of ahbez's exact phrases and talking points are repeated in both sources, and, in the second, he and Cole both read from scripts.) But the story they tell together on We The People is that ahbez, after being denied entrance backstage at a theater where Cole was performing, gave the enveloped song to a doorman who delivered it to Cole. Without ahbez's address, however, Cole had to begin a search for the songwriter in order to seek permission to record the song. The journalist for Life Magazine writes that these events, as well as the recording of the song, all occurred before the Petrillo Ban, which refers to a 1948 musician's strike. Proto-hippie origin lore aside, according to Jack Gottlieb, in Funny, It Doesn't Sound Jewish: How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood, the melodies of "Nature Boy" resemble melodies in the 1935 song  "Shvayg mayn harts," written by Herman Yablokoff, as well as a motif in the second movement of Antonin Dvorák's "Piano Quartet in A, op. 81." Citing Yablokoff's memoir, Der Payatz, Gottlieb details a plagiarism lawsuit filed by Yablokoff against ahbez which was settled out of court.






Whoever is responsible for the song's composition, it is uncontested that Cole is responsible for the song's place as a timely and exemplary crossover from the Race Records charts to the top singles chart, which was typically predominated by white vocalists and musicians: the song finished the year at the 11th position on the Billboard's year-end Race Records chart and at the 14th position on the top singles chart. Yet despite the crossover, according to the 2014 documentary Nat King Cole: Afraid of the Dark, Cole wore skin-lightening makeup when he performed on television, and, when he and his family moved to the majority white LA neighborhood Hancock Park in 1948, their presence was met with protest and they were routinely terrorized by neighbors, inveterate vandals, and hate groups. Cole landed a variety show on NBC in 1956, but the show was cancelled after just a year without a sponsor willing to run the risk of aggravating racist audiences. 


Nevertheless, the song remains an uncanny testament to the greatness of loving and being loved in return, and it bears relevance to Ernest Gaines' novel not for its titular character and enchanted spiritual landscape, but for the simple profundity of its famous chorus. "The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return"––some readings might suggest this is the titular lesson of A Lesson Before Dying. For example, toward the end of the novel, the reader is given access to Jefferson's Diary. This is the first time the novel breaks from Grant's first-person point of view, and the first time the reader can truly bear witness to Jefferson's mostly withheld interiority during what could be read as the pangs of a transformation. Here, we can see Jefferson wrestling with a conception of love that is as yet beyond him, and still he persists:
 

mr wigin you say you like what i got here but you say you stil cant giv me a a jus a b cause you say i aint gone deep in me yet an you kno i can if i try hard an when i ax you what you mean deep in me you say jus say whats on my mind so one day you can be save an you can save the chiren and i say i don't kno what you mean an you say i do know what you mean an you look so tied sometime mr wigin i just feel like tellin you i like you but i dont know how to say this cause i aint never say it to nobody before an nobody aint never say it to me

i know i care for nanan but i dont know if love is care cause cuttin wood and haulin water and things like that i dont know if thats love or jus work to do an you say thats love but you say you know i got mo an jus that to say an when i lay ther at nite and cant sleep i try an think what you mean i got mo cause i aint done this much thinkin and this much writin in all my life befor (Gaines 228-229)

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