Who was the first ever hippie?

I’ve heard this guy being touted as the original hippie. He was about 20 years ahead of the movement, but many people looked back on the way he lived his life for an example.

This is Nat King Cole singing the song that made *eden ahbez briefly mainstream and famous. He was known as the original Nature Boy, not just because of the song, but by his lifestyle as well.

*He refused to capitalize his name.

What about Jesus? He was pretty hippyesque with all his beliefs of peace and loving one another. He was also very radical for his time.

This is a quote from wikipedia on the hippie page.

“A July 1967 Time Magazine study on hippie philosophy credited the foundation of the hippie movement with historical precedent as far back as the counterculture of the Ancient Greeks, espoused by philosophers like Diogenes of Sinope and the Cynics also as early forms of hippie culture. It also named as notable influences the religious and spiritual teachings of Henry David Thoreau, Hillel the Elder, Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, and J.R.R. Tolkien”

Perhaps Adam and Eve were the first hippies?

It , to me, would be someone during the Vietnam War or the Beatles. Beatniks came before hippies in the fifties but we didn’t know much about them.
Ah; it’s so helpful to be old as dirt .

Maynard G. Krebs.

@gondwanalon made a good call, but that lifestyle goes back throughout history. The Bohemians certainly were, and Socrates would qualify.

Wikipedia says this about Flower Power:
The expression was coined by the American beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1965 as a means to transform war protests into peaceful affirmative spectacles.

Hippies were the kids that were called “beatniks” a decade earlier. Some of them were even the very same kids. For this reason, I’ll nominate Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac as the first hippies (since they are the only Beat Generation icons I can think of that I know hung out with hippie kids later) and Neal Cassady as their inspiration.

Add Walt Whitman to the list, maybe even as the first American hippie. He was a hippie in every which way.

Thanks @keobooks and @rexacoracofalipitorius and to all the other fellow jellies.
I think this was very informative.
@dxs strangely Jesus also came to mind when thinking of hippies.

Zonker Harris.

The Summer Of Love was just the beginning
That’s when the light started breaking through
The Summer Of Love is just a memory now
But even though those times are gone
The spirit still goes on in me and you
from “Summer of Love” by Jefferson Airplane, 1987

And we are dying off. We sure could use a new movement.