The Lion Sleeps Tonight
"Mbube" is a popular song originally written and composed by the South African musician Solomon Linda in 1939. It was first published in South Africa and made its way to the United States a decade later. In 1961, the Tokens adapted the melody and added English lyrics to produce "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", lending the song the name by which it is best known today.
Linda, a Zulu migrant worker, led the a capella group the Evening Birds. In 1939, without rehearsal, they recorded "Mbube", which fused traditional Zulu musical elements with Western influences. The recording was then released in South Africa to widespread popularity. It made Linda a local celebrity and shaped the development of the isicathamiya genre. However, he had sold his rights to "Mbube" to the owner of his parent record company, Eric Gallo, for ten shillings, unaware of what the transaction implied. This kept Linda from earning royalties. The recording of "Mbube" was then sent to a record label in the US, and upon being unearthed, it passed onto Pete Seeger of the folk group the Weavers. They covered the song in 1951 as "Wimoweh". A decade later, the Tokens, a doo-wop group, encountered "Wimoweh" and decided to record their own version. After adapting the melody and adding English lyrics, they released "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", although Linda did not receive any credit. It topped the US charts.
By the mid-2000s, around 150 artists across the world had covered the song, and it had been included in the 1994 Disney film The Lion King, earning an estimated $15 million in royalties. Linda, who had died three decades earlier, was yet unrecognised for his contributions to "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". His descendants had earned very little and were left destitute. Emboldened, they filed a lawsuit against Disney for copyright violation in 2004. Within two years, they reached an out-of-court settlement with Abilene Music, in which the firm agreed to pay the family a lump sum for past royalties and offer them a share of future revenue. The case drew international attention and bore wider legal implications, such as on British copyright law.
While global commercial success transformed "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" into an iconic pop song, the song is now associated with long-running racial exploitation. The song and Linda's history has been probed in numerous documentaries and is the part-inspiration of the 2020 film Black Is King.
Background and release
was born in rural Natal, in southern Africa. During his childhood, he followed the Virginia Jubilee Singers, an American minstrel group that toured South Africa and performed spirituals. A migrant worker and beer hall singer, Linda sang in a short-lived choir named the Evening Birds, which dissolved in 1933. Soon after, he founded a new group under the same name. The group, comprising himself as soprano, Gilbert Madondo as alto, Boy Sibiya as tenor, and Samuel Mlangeni, Gideon Mkhize, and Owen Sikhakhane as basses, performed a cappella in the weekends and quickly grew a local following. Working-class culture in South Africa flourished around this time as the nation's manufacturing industry grew. After moving to Johannesburg, Linda became a packer at Eric Gallo's local record-pressing plant, the only one in black Africa. It was not long before the firm's talent scout noticed the Evening Birds and invited them to the recording studio. Back then, record firms eyed Zulu close-harmony vocal music owing to its appeal to migrant mineworkers.The Evening Birds recorded multiple songs at Gallo's studio, and during their second session, in 1939, they recorded "Mbube". It was finished without prior rehearsal after three takes. Also featured in the recording are Peter Rezant on guitar, Emily Motsieloa on piano, and possibly Willie Gumede on banjo. Gallo was impressed with "Mbube" and had it converted into 78 rpm records; it then aired on the rediffusion, a landline that transmitted music and news across black neighbourhoods.
Composition
Performed in four-part harmony with Mlangeni, Mkhize, and Sikhakhane on bass, Madondo and Sibiya on middle tones, and Linda on soprano, "Mbube" is sung in a call and response format: the phrases of each section overlap with each other. It follows a cyclical structure. The melody is built over three chords, and the chord progression borrows from the marabi harmonic cycle common in twentieth-century South African music.Journalist Sharon LaFraniere describes the melody as "tender... almost childish in its simplicity". In South African author Rian Malan's view, "'Mbube' wasn't the most remarkable tune, but there was something terribly compelling about the underlying chant, a dense meshing of low male voices above which Linda yodeled and howled for two minutes, mostly making it up as he went along". Of particular interest to commentators are the song's final few seconds, where Linda breaks out into a brief howl that Malan describes as "a haunting skein of fifteen notes". This would later become the melodic basis for the Tokens' cover.
The lyrics, written in Zulu, are said to document an episode of Linda's childhood when he chased a lion while herding cattle.
The chorus "wembube" is repeated throughout. "Mbube" borrows strongly from Western influences introduced by missionaries and white singing troupes, among which is the four-part harmony, with music historian Veit Erlmann asserting that the main body "displays only a few features which can be said to be rooted in traditional performance practice." These Western elements, argues journalist Lior Phillips, "gave 'Mbube' a chance globally". Erlmann notes that the song's triadic structure and harmonic progression resemble urban, Westernised genres and that, by contrast, the metrically-free introduction mirrors traditional dance music. The vocal lines are intended to evoke tin whistles characteristic of South African street music.
Reception
"Mbube" achieved widespread success. With over 100,000 copies sold in Africa over the next nine years, Erlmann considers it the first South African "hit". It made Linda "a legend in the Zulu subculture", and his band went on to dominate all-night song competitions, according to Malan. Nonetheless, he did not profit, as he sold his rights to "Mbube" to Eric Gallo for ten shillings just after the recording session. Seeing that Linda could not read and had no understanding of royalties, a South African court would, by 2006, deem this deal unfair. Gallo also paid Linda the equivalent of $2 for the first run of a few hundred records. The Evening Birds continued performing until 1948, remaining prominent till their disbanding. But Linda would never attain wealth or fortune. He lived in a household with a dirt floor coated in cow manure, and malnutrition took the life of one of his children. In 1959, Linda collapsed onstage, which doctors ruled a result of kidney failure. He died three years later aged 53. At the time of his death, his bank account contained roughly $40 in today's money. His family could not afford a tombstone."Mbube" defined contemporary South African music and the isicathamiya genre. Isicathamiya is a form of a capella choral song stemming from "elements of Zulu traditional music ... rehearsed and performed after hours in migrant workers' hostels", in writer Gwen Ansell's words, along with Western, Christian influences. The word mbube became shorthand for male a cappella choral singing in South Africa and lent its name to a distinct music style. This style, notes anthropologist David B. Coplan, "appealed across the class spectrum, melodised a growing African nationalism, created nostalgia for a lost society, and fused urban and rural values". According to Erlmann, "Mbube" became "canonic for an entire generation of performers". For instance, all subsequent South African music styles adopted its booming I-IV-V bass patterns.
The Weavers version
Some years later, Gallo sent a bundle of records to Decca Records in the United States. They were about to be discarded before a Decca employee and ethnomusicologist, Alan Lomax, salvaged them; among these records was "Mbube". He handed the box over to folk singer Pete Seeger of the Weavers. A penniless banjo player, Seeger had entered the music scene after quitting university and accustoming himself with popular songs of the Great Depression. "Mbube" fascinated him, and he promptly transcribed it word for word, although he misheard the chorus as wimoweh. "What really grabbed Pete", writes Jeese Jarnow in his Weavers biography, "was the high, worldess falsetto that floated on top and—most especially—where it landed, in a secondary melody, sad and sweet".Seeger convened the band at the Village Vanguard to record it. He attempted to describe the vocal parts of "Mbube" as he heard them, and the Weavers eventually settled on a repeated chant of "wimoweh, a-wimoweh", with Seeger performing falsettoes. As Malan writes, their recording "was faithful to the Zulu original in almost all respects save for the finger-popping rhythm". To broaden its appeal, the bandleader Gordon Jenkins composed a brass accompaniment to the recording, which stressed Linda's brief howl toward the end of "Mbube".
In December 1951, the Weavers released "Wimoweh". Seeger later remarked that it was "just about my favorite song to sing for the next forty years". Shortly after its release, Gallo sold "Mbube" to the American Richmond Organization in exchange for the rights to administer "Wimoweh" in some bush territories. Even though records of "Mbube" contained the words African Music Research Copyright Control, Richmond claimed it was a folk song. All songwriting credits were thus given to the fictitious "Paul Campbell", a tactic enabling the Weavers to claim royalties on songs from the public domain, even if "Mbube" was not in the public domain. Such a practice was common at the time. Royalties for "Wimoweh" were split two ways: half went to the Weavers' publishers—Howard Richmond and Albert Brackman—and their manager, Pete Kameron, and the other half to the Weavers. None went to Linda.
"Wimoweh" reached No. 6 on the US charts, but this success was briefly derailed when Harvey Matusow, a prolific informer of the McCarthy era, accused three of the Weavers of being affiliated with the Communist Party. Nevertheless, it became a Weavers standard. The song's profile was raised when they performed it at Carnegie Hall in 1957. Jimmy Dorsey and the Kingston Trio recorded covers around this time.