<P> "Nature Boy" has received wide acclaim from critics and contemporary reviewers . Author Ted Gioia noted in his book, The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire, that all the musicians "who had created the golden age of American popular song had their quirks and idiosyncrasies, but eden ahbez demands pride and place as the most eccentric of them all". He added that along with promoting the hippie culture, with "Nature Boy", ahbez and Cole was able to introduce a new era of black artists in white popular music . In his book Sinatra! the Song is You: A Singer's Art, author Will Friedwald complimented Cole's version, saying that it had been the "startingly fresh" combination of the singer's vocals along with the string section, which had made "Nature Boy" a hit . Stephen Cook from AllMusic said that the song transformed Cole into "one of the most famous and beloved pop singing stars of the postwar years ." Billboard noted that such was the popularity of the song that audiences would only stay in theaters to see Cole perform "Nature Boy", and leave once he finished . A 1975 poll by the magazine listed it as the "Greatest All - Round Record" as well as the "Favorite Pop Recording" of the previous years . In 1999, the song was awarded the Grammy Hall of Fame, a special Grammy Award established in 1973 to honor recordings that are at least twenty - five years old and that have "qualitative or historical significance". Steve Erickson from Los Angeles magazine gave a detailed positive review of the song: </P> <P> "Nature Boy" is so otherworldly in its melody and lyric that any number of interpretations over the decades, from Nat Cole's to Alex Chilton's, have never been able to make it ordinary . It sounds like something that, from the minute it was written, existed out of time and place--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 . </P> <P> Yiddish theatre composer Herman Yablokoff claimed in his biography, Memoirs of the Yiddish Stage, 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). When met with a lawsuit in 1951 for the plagiarization, ahbez first proclaimed his innocence, and telephoned Yablokoff to explain that he "had heard the melody as if angels were singing it...in the California mountains . He offered me $10,000 to withdraw the suit . I said that the money was not important, but I wanted him to admit that the song was geganvet (stolen); and if he heard angels, they must have bought a copy of my song ." Eventually ahbez's lawyers offered to have an out - of - court settlement, offering $25,000 ($230,673 in 2016 dollars) to Yablokoff, which he accepted . Freidwald remarked that "it struck no one as ironic that a song with message of love and peace should come to symbolize how cutthroat the pop music business was becoming". </P> <P> The success of "Nature Boy" soon led to the release of a number of cover versions of the track . However, due to the AFM ban, other record companies could not release full versions with strings, only a cappella tracks . Following Cole's version of "Nature Boy", the Dick Haymes recording was released by Decca Records as catalog number 24439 . The record first appeared on the Billboard charts on June 4, 1948, and peaked at number 11 . </P>

The greatest thing you'll ever learn bowie