The Sad Truth Behind The Lion Sleeps Tonight

There is an interesting story behind the origins of one of the most successful pop songs ever: The Lion Sleeps Tonight. It's a journey that spans multiple continents, several decades, and millions of dollars.

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The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is a song originally written and recorded by Solomon Linda in South Africa in 1939. The song was originally entitle "Mbube". Solomon Linda's original version was written in Zulu. In the 1950s and 60s, Mbube was adapted, covered, and restyled by many international pop and folk revival artists - most famously by the Tokens who went on to make millions as it became one of the most successful pop songs of all time. The song has been featured in a number of films and tv shows including Disney's The Lion King and the sitcom Friends. Plus, this story has been turned into a Netflix documentary called ReMastered: The Lion's Share.

#TheLionSleepsTonight

Transcript (highlights):

December 18th 1961, The Tokens earn a No.1 hit with The Lion Sleeps Tonight. The song that topped the Billboard pop chart on December 18, 1961, was an instant classic that went on to become one of the most successful pop songs of all time, yet its true originator saw only a tiny fraction of the song’s enormous profits. If you don’t want your feelings on this song to be tainted by the depressing truth of the origins of this song, please skip to this part of the video now. For those of you that do, here it comes.

The story begins in Johannesburg, South Africa,1938. A group of Zulu singers called Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds stepped into the first recording studio ever set up in sub-Saharan Africa and recorded a song called “Mbube”— which is Zulu for “the lion.” and it sounded like this. play song. Sound a bit familiar…yeah. “Mbube” was a regional hit, and it helped make Solomon Linda into a South African star. And the story might have ended there had a copy of the record not made its way to New York City in the early 1950s, where it was saved from the slush pile at Decca Records by the legendary folklorist Alan Lomax.

Without actually hearing any of the records in a box sent from Africa, Lomax thought his friend, Pete Seeger a famous folksinger at the time. Unable to understand the lyrics of “Mbube,” Seeger transcribed the central chant as “Wimoweh,” and that became the name of the song as recorded by the Weavers and released in early 1952, and it sounded like this play song However, this was just as the group was about to be blacklisted thanks to the McCarthy hearings. Eventually, Jay Siegel, the teenage lead singer of the Tokens, would hear and fall in love with “Wimoweh” through the Kingston Trio’s cover version of the Weavers’ song.

The Tokens’ label commissioned English-language lyrics for the song, which was re-titled “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and went on to become not just a #1 song on this day in 1961, and it sounded like the play song but one of the most-covered, most successful pop songs of all time. In 2000, South African journalist Rian Malan followed the music and the money associated with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” exposing the series of business arrangements that ended up making millions for a handful of prominent U.S. music publishers while yielding only a $1,000 check from Pete Seeger to Solomon Linda during Linda’s lifetime. Because Solomon's composition was treated as public-domain “folk” material by Seeger and by the subsequent writer of the English-language lyrics in the Tokens’ version, Linda never participated in the royalty stream generated by either “Wimoweh” or “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

And prior to reaching an undisclosed settlement in 2006, his heirs received only a tiny fraction of the millions of dollars they might have been due had Linda retained his songwriting credit on what Malan rightly calls “The most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa.” Yeah, pretty disheartening isn't it? anyway, I’ve got to do a welcome back for the people who skipped it. Welcome back, hope you continue to enjoy the song with out the emotional burden the rest of us will carry round every time we hear it.

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