The Lion Sleeps Tonight

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"The Lion Sleeps Tonight"

The Lion Sleeps Tonight by The Tokens
Single by The Tokens
B-side Dry Your Eyes
Released 1961
Genre R&B
Doo-wop
World music
Length 2:38
Label RCA Records
Writer(s) Solomon Linda
Hugo Peretti
Luigi Creatore
George David Weiss
Albert Stanton
Audio sample
file info · help

"The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is an acclaimed song sung by The Tokens and written as Mbube by Solomon Linda.

Contents

[edit] History

"Mbube" (Zulu for "lion") was first recorded by its writer, Solomon Linda, and his group, the Evening Birds, in 1939. Gallo Record Company paid Linda a single fee for the recording and no royalties. "Mbube" became a hit throughout South Africa and sold about 100,000 copies during the 1940s. The song became so popular that Mbube lent its name to a style of African a cappella music, though the style has since been mostly replaced by isicathamiya (a softer version).

Alan Lomax brought the song to the attention of Pete Seeger of the folk group The Weavers. It was on one of several records Lomax lent to Seeger.[1] After having performed the song for at least a year in their concerts, in November, 1951, the Weavers recorded their version entitled "Wimoweh", a mishearing of the original song's chorus of 'uyimbube' (meaning "you're a lion"). Pete Seeger had made some of his own additions to the melody. The song was credited exclusively to Paul Campbell, a fictitious entity used by Howard Richmond to copyright material in the public domain.

Pete Seeger explains in one recording, "it refers to an old legend down there, [about] their last king [of the Zulus], who was known as Shaka The Lion. Legend says, Shaka The Lion didn't die when Europeans took over our country; he simply went to sleep, and he'll wake up some day." (See "Senzenina / Wimoweh" on Seeger's With Voices Together We Sing (Live).) cf. sleeping hero

It was published by Folkways, a subsidiary of Richmond/TRO. Their 1952 version, arranged by Gordon Jenkins, became a top-twenty hit in the U.S., and their live 1957 recording turned it into a folk music staple. This version was covered in 1959 by The Kingston Trio.

New lyrics to the song were written by George David Weiss, Luigi Creatore, and Hugo Peretti, based very loosely upon the meaning of the original song. The Tokens' 1961 cover of this version rose to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and still receives fairly frequent replay on many American oldies radio stations. In the UK, an up-tempo, yodel-dominated rendering was a top-ten hit for Karl Denver and his Trio. In 1971, Robert John also recorded this version, and it reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972. Since then, "Wimoweh" / "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" has remained popular and frequently covered.

[edit] Copyright issues

Pete Seeger later said in the book A Lion's Trail, "The big mistake I made was not making sure that my publisher signed a regular songwriters’ contract with Linda. My publisher simply sent Linda some money and copyrighted The Weavers’ arrangement here and sent The Weavers some money."

Seeger's publisher was The Richmond Organization (TRO), which also goes by a number of other names, including Ludlow, Cromwell, Essex, Hollis, Melody Trails, and Folkways Music Publishers. Since Solomon Linda's 1939 "Mbube" was apparently not under copyright protection, TRO founder Howard Richmond had himself claimed authorship to "Wimoweh" using a pseudonym, in this case "Paul Campbell". This not illegal but was customary in the music business, the purpose of the pseudonym possibly being to avoid embarrassment, so that it wouldn't look like, for example, that Howie Richmond had claimed authorship for an old song like "Greensleeves" (a song he claimed author's royalties for under the name Jessie Cavanaugh).[2] The songwriter and publisher's share of the royalties are customarily split 50-50, with the performers, song pluggers', and agents' shares usually come out of the composer's half. By claiming author's rights, TRO thus secured for itself a portion of the songwriters' royalties as well as all of the publishers' share of the song's earnings.[3]

"Originally they were going to send the royalties to Gallo [a huge South African music publisher] ," Seeger recalled. "I said, 'Don't do that, because Linda won't get a penny.'"

Anti-apartheid activists put Seeger in touch with a Johannesburg lawyer, who set forth into the forbidden townships to find Solomon Linda. Once contact was established, Seeger sent the Zulu a $1,000 check and instructed his publisher to do the same with all future payments. He was still bragging about it fifty years later. "I never got author's royalties on 'Wimoweh'," Seeger said. "Right from '51 or '52, I understood that the money was going to Linda. I assumed they were keeping the publisher's fifty percent and sending the rest."

Unfortunately, Solomon's family maintains that the money only arrived years later, and even then, it was nothing like the full writer's share Seeger was hoping to bestow.[4]

In 2000, South African journalist Rian Malan wrote a feature article for Rolling Stone magazine, highlighting Linda's story and estimating that the song had earned U.S. $15 million for its use in the movie The Lion King alone; this prompted the South African documentary A Lion's Trail by François Verster that documented the song's history. Screened by PBS, in September 2006,[5] the documentary won an Emmy Award.[6]

In July 2004, the song became the subject of a lawsuit between the family of its writer Solomon Linda, represented by Dr. Owen Dean of Spoor & Fisher and Disney. The suit claimed that Disney owed $1.6 million in royalties for the use of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" in the film and stage production of The Lion King. Meanwhile, TRO/Folkways, publisher of The Weavers' "Wimoweh", began to pay $3,000 annually to Linda's heirs.

In February 2006, Linda's heirs reached a legal settlement for an undisclosed amount with Abilene Music, who held the worldwide rights and had licensed the song to Disney. This settlement has applied to worldwide rights, not just South Africa, since 1987.

[edit] Selected list of recorded versions

[edit] Mbube

[edit] Wimoweh

"The Lion Sleeps Tonight"

The Lion Sleeps Tonight by Tight Fit
Single by Tight Fit
from the album Tight Fit
Released January 1982
Genre Pop
Length 3:18
Label Jive Records
Writer(s) Hugo Peretti
Luigi Creatore
George David Weiss
Albert Stanton
Solomon Linda
Producer Tim Friese-Greene
Certification Gold
Tight Fit singles chronology
Back to the Sixties Part II
(1981)		 The Lion Sleep Tonight
(1982)		 Fantasy Island
(1982)

[edit] The Lion Sleeps Tonight

[edit] References

  1. ^ Liner notes, Pete Seeger's Greatest Hits, released 1962.
  2. ^ "After all, what was a folk song? Who owned it? It was just out there, like a wild horse or a tract of virgin land on an unconquered continent. Fortune awaited the man bold enough to fill out the necessary forms and name himself as the composer of a new interpretation of some ancient tune like, say, "Greensleeves." A certain Jessie Cavanaugh did exactly that in the early Fifties, only it wasn't really Jessie at all -- it was Howie Richmond under an alias. This was a common practice on Tin Pan Alley at the time, and it wasn't illegal or anything. The object was to claim writer's royalties on new versions of old songs that belonged to no one. The aliases may have been a way to avoid potential embarrassment, just in case word got out that Howard S. Richmond was presenting himself as the author of a madrigal from Shakespeare's day. SegerFile.com, Rian Malan, "In The Jungle".
  3. ^ Where does the lion sleep tonight?
  4. ^ SegerFile.com, Rian Malan, "In The Jungle"
  5. ^ PBS: The Lion's Trail
  6. ^ "EmmyOnline.tv, National Television Academy Presents 27th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards" (press release), September 25, 2006
  7. ^ "De Nederlandse Top 40, week 16, 1982". http://www.radio538.nl/web/show/id=44685/chartid=6462. Retrieved 2008-02-18. 

[edit] External links

 This article's external links may not follow Wikipedia's content policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links. (July 2009)
Preceded by
"Please Mr. Postman" by The Marvelettes		 Billboard Hot 100 number one single (The Tokens version)
December 18, 1961 (three weeks)		 Succeeded by
"The Twist" by Chubby Checker
Preceded by
"Town Called Malice" by The Jam		 UK number one single (Tight Fit version)
6 March 1982 - 20 March 1982		 Succeeded by
"Seven Tears" by Goombay Dance Band
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_Sleeps_Tonight"