Nat King Cole - Nature Boy (E. Ahbez) ~ Erwin Lazaro 105

I love the haunting melody for “Nature Boy”, completely capturing my full attention with every note, pure genius for me, anyway.  The lyrics: no other as profound.  It’s so easy for me to get lost in the music.

This one’s fulfilling a request.  I tried to find the comment for the person requesting this but I can’t seem to find it anymore.  The person couldn’t recall the title of this song, but knew the first line of the first verse.  Thankfully, I had already recorded it on October 28, 2011.  I used my precognitive ability. [Straining in thought]

With my old equipment wiped from functioning existence, I’m basically starting from scratch.  I’m currently relying on my video archives that I was saving for “rainy days” such as these.  It’s pouring right now, but I’m prepared.  This is quite a frustrating process, but I’m trying to get my system up and running again.  Not the way I anticipated ending one year and transitioning into the next, but it’s my reality.  I look at this struggle as an opportunity to grow and improve.  By golly, that’s exactly what I’m going to do!  C H A R G E ! ! !

From Wikipedia:
"Nature Boy" is a song by Eden Ahbez, published in 1947.  The song tells a fantasy of a "strange enchanted boy... who wandered very far" only to learn that "the greatest thing... was just to love and be loved in return".  Nat King Cole's 1948 recording of the song was a major hit and "Nature Boy" has since become a pop and jazz standard, with dozens of major artists interpreting the song.

The first two measures of the song's melody parallel the melody of the second movement in Antonín Dvořák's Piano Quintet No. 2 in A, Op. 81 (1887).  It is unknown if Ahbez was familiar with Dvořák's piece, or if he arrived at the same melodic idea independently.  Yiddish theater star/producer Herman Yablokoff, in Memoirs of the Yiddish Stage, claimed that the melody to "Nature Boy" was plagiarized from his song "Shvayg, Mayn Harts" ("Hush, My Heart"), which he wrote for his play Papirosn (1935).  Ahbez protested his innocence, claiming to have “heard the tune in the mist of the California mountains,” but later agreed to pay Yablokoff $25,000 in an out-of-court settlement.  The song is based on a 1940s Los Angeles-based group called "Nature Boys," a subculture of proto-hippies of which Ahbez was a member.