Don't even ask me what got me started down this road, but this evening I reached a place where I had to do this. Once when I was a kid, about 1972, my father was driving me home from baseball practice and the song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" came on the radio. This was the version by Robert John (fricking everybody has recorded some kind of version of this song at some point -- it's kind of like "Gloria" by Them) that went to No. 3 on the pop charts in 1972. Dad said something along the lines of "I know this song. It was popular when I was in boot camp. It's called 'Wimoweh.'"
Naturally, I knew that the song was new and my dad was disturbingly wrong. My dad was at Parris Island in 1951, so there was no damn way he'd heard this song then. I was a music guy even then, so I assumed he was thinking of the "original" hit by The Tokens, who took the song to No. 1 in 1961. I was wrong, and it is probably about time for me to apologize to my father.
"The Lion Sleeps Tonight," as folks now know, was derived from a song written in the 1920s by a South African Zulu named Solomon Linda. With his vocal group, the Evening Birds, he recorded the song in 1939, giving us this early version:
Unfortunately for Solomon, he sold the rights to the song for roughly two dollars and died broke in 1962, even though the song had already made a bunch of money for folks like The Kingston Trio, The Tokens and, even at that point, many others. The first group to revive the song was The Weavers, well-known communist Pete Seeger's folk group, who did this version in 1952, calling it "Wimoweh" and taking it to No. 6 on the U.S. pop charts:
The Tokens added a bunch of English lyrics and went to No. 1 in 1961:
The Disney movie "The Lion King" only added to the stack of cash made by the song over the years.
So, basically, you have a song written by a guy who created the style of music that gave us Ladysmith Black Mombazo, the Zulu group made famous by their work on Paul Simon's Graceland album, that made a pile of money for lots of people, including Ladysmith Black Mombazo:
Happy ending, kids. In 2006, the daughters of Solomon Linda won a copyright suit that gave them big bucks for Solomon's work. Good result. Great song.
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