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THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT

MONDAY, 30 AUGUST 2010
Song of the Week
by Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, George David Weiss, Paul Campbell, Albert
Stanton and Solomon Linda
In the jungle, the mighty jungle
The Lion Sleeps Tonight...
- but don't be surprised if it in the wee small hours he wakes up and gives a plaintive howl
through the mighty jungle for the man who wrote those words. George David Weiss died last
week at the age of 89. He had a remarkable career that effortlessly embraced whatever
fashions in pop music threw at him. He wrote hits for Sinatra ("Oh, What It Seemed To Be", a
song Frank loved) and Elvis ("Can't Help Falling In Love"); he embraced jazz (the lyrics to
George Shearing's "Lullaby Of Birdland"), Broadway (Mister Wonderful, a Sammy Davis vehicle
that made a hit out of "Too Close To Comfort") and Philadelphia soul ("Let's Put It All
Together" for the Stylistics); and at the end of the Sixties he wrote a Louis Armstrong hit that
transcends category, "What A Wonderful World". But few songs have as convoluted a tale
behind them as George Weiss' leonine hit of the early Sixties.
Whether you've heard Pete Seeger singing it as "Wimoweh" or Tight Fit's 1982 British Number
One of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", you know this tune. Tight Fit sounds like a vaguely parodic
name for a boy band, but in fact they were a coed combo - one boy, two girls, a male model
and two female dancers, hired as a photogenic front after the record had already been
made. The girls had failed to make the cut at an audition for the more successfully contrived
group, Bucks Fizz, and were shortly booted out of Tight Fit, too. But for a few weeks in 1982
on the BBC's "Top Of The Pops" they did well enough moving about in synchronized
"Wimowehs" while the male model mouthed to a vocal track actually sung by a guy from the
band City Boy.
The bottom inevitably drops out of even the Tightest Fits of the music biz, but "The Lion
Sleeps Tonight" roars on regardless. It's one of the biggest songs ever about a lion, apart from
the Oscar-winning "Born Free" and the Eagles" "You can't hide those lion eyes". After Tight
Fit, "The Lion Sleeps" was a hit all over the world on stage and screen, in Disney's The Lion
King, and then on Broadway, in the stage version. Before Tight Fit, it was a Billboard Number
Three for Robert John in the Seventies, a Number One for the Tokens in the Sixties; as
"Wimoweh", it was a hit for Seeger's Weavers in the Fifties, and in the Forties, as "Mbube"...
Ah, but that's where the story gets murkier.
Who wrote those words about the mighty jungle? It was George Weiss, a reliable man about
Manhattan in the music business for a good half-century. The title song for Mister Wonderful
did very nicely for Peggy Lee and "Too Close For Comfort" did very nicely for Sammy Davis Jr,
Eartha Kitt, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Steve and Eydie, and pretty much everybody else.
And with the hot music-biz producers Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore he adapted "Can't Help
Falling In Love" from the old chanson "Plaisir d'Amour" and gave Elvis, Andy Williams and the
Stylistics a boffo smash.
That was the brief for "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". In 1961, the Tokens, a group from Brighton
Beach, Brooklyn, turned up to audition for Hugo and Luigi at RCA and sang "Wimoweh", a

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beloved staple of the Weavers, the Kingston Trio and other luminaries of the folk boom. And
it was fine, but Hugo and Luigi were in the market for something a little less folkie and
turned to their pal George Weiss to see if he'd be interested in turning it into a more or less
regular pop song. Weiss didn't much care for the guys a-hootin' an' a-hollerin' "A-wimoweh
a-wimoweh" bar after bar like a bunch of buttondown Brooklynite tribesmen, but an
eight-bar instrumental phrase at the end of all the zeudo-Zulu ululating caught his fancy. So
he moved it up and made it the melodic center of the song and then figured out what the
lyric ought to be about. The Tokens had mentioned to Huge and Luge (as they called their
pop biz honchos) that the South African consulate had told them the the song was something
to do with a lion. Okay, thought Weiss. So it's a song about a lion. What's the lion doing? Not
much:
In the jungle, the mighty jungle
The Lion Sleeps Tonight...
The lyric's a masterful way of taking what's really little more than a wonderfully catchy hook
and using it to hint at a whole world. After that first phrase, Weiss mulled it over and for the
next couplet added one - 1 - new adjective:
In the jungle, the quiet jungle
The Lion Sleeps Tonight...
Okay, now what? Well, who else is in the neighborhood?
Near the village, the peaceful village
The Lion Sleeps Tonight...
And how about we reprise the hit adjective from the previous verselet?
Near the village, the quiet village
The Lion Sleeps Tonight...
And then Weiss hints at just a wee bit of potential drama:
Hush, my darling, don't fear, my darling
The Lion Sleeps Tonight...
And that's pretty much it. Sixty-two words, or (excluding repetitions) 16 words. I can't
improve on the brilliant analysis by Ilonka David-Biluska, who was briefly a Continental
vedette in the Sixties and billed as "The Voice of South Africa", despite her Hungarian name.
Invited by EMI in Amsterdam to sing the Dutch version of the song, Ilonka wasn't impressed:
I looked at the lyrics and my heart sank. Apart from a prodigious number of
‘Wimowehs', there were only three lines. I shall paraphrase: a lion is sleeping in a
mighty but quiet jungle, near a peaceful and quiet village and a darling,
presumably somewhere in a hut in the village, is told to hush and not to fear
because the lion is asleep tonight. The Dutch translation, according to the sheet
music (which was later published with my photograph on the cover) left out the
fearful darling and noted merely that the jungle was big, the village small and the
night dark. Oh yes, the lion was still asleep.

I refused to sing it.

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Back in New York, the Tokens did as they were told but didn't care for it. "We were
embarrassed," said Phil Margo, "and tried to convince Hugo and Luigi not to release it. They
said it would be a big record and it was going out." It had an orchestra, a trio of Tokens doing
the wimoweh-ing, Jay Siegal's falsetto, an opera singer with a spare half-hour who came in
and did a bit of contrapuntal howling. The first time the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson heard it he
had to pull off the road he was so overawed. Carole King declared the record a bona fide
"motherf---er". It hit Number One at Christmas 1961. Much to her disgust, Ilonka David-
Biluska's version, "De Leeuw Slaapt Vannacht", reached Number One in the Netherlands.
Henri Salvador's somewhat more final-sounding "Le lion est mort ce soir" was Number One in
France. Pace Phil Margo and Ilonka, it is, in fact, very hard not to make a ton of dough from
"The Lion Sleeps Tonight".
Unless, that is, you're a fellow called Solomon Linda. Those words about "the jungle, the
mighty jungle" sit so perfectly and indivisibly on those notes they sound like they've belonged
to each other for all time. We know the lyric is George Weiss', but where did the tune come
from?
Well, it's obvious, isn't it? It was a "Zulu chant" - ie, "traditional - ie, "anonymous" - ie, out of
copyright. Which meant someone else could put it back in copyright. In the Fifties and early
Sixties, public demand for "authentic" "traditional" music created a huge windfall for savvy
Tin Pan Alleymen. You take some half-forgotten folk dirge, tweak it here and there, and then
copyright your version as a full-blown composition in its own right. Everyone was doing it: in
the Fifties, "Frankie And Johnny", "Auld Lang Syne", "Greensleeves" and a bunch of other
things that had been around forever were being copyrighted as brand new songs. Huge and
Luge had done it with "Can't Help Falling In Love", ne "Plaisir d'Amour". So the first thing
they wondered, when the Tokens showed up and began doing their Zulu impressions, was
where did this "Wimoweh" thing come from anyway? They looked at the song credits: "Paul
Campbell" and "Albert Stanton".
Bingo! There was no such "Paul" and no such "Albert". Mr "Campbell" was the name Pete
Seeger and the Weavers put on the sheet music when they'd recorded a folk tune and
decided they'd like to cut themselves a piece of the songwriting action. And Mr "Stanton" was
the name Al Brackman at the Richmond publishing house put on the music when he wanted
to do the same for the publishing royalties. Messrs "Campbell" and "Stanton" were thus
successful 20th century songwriters who apparently hadn't written anything since the
mid-19th century.
So the minute Huge and Luge saw those names on "Wimoweh" they knew it was a Pete Seeger
cash-in job, and thus, from their point of view, a plum just ripe for a second picking. If it
ever came to court, Huge, Luge and George Weiss' defense would be yes, they'd plagiarized
it not from the non-existent "Campbell" and "Stanton" but from the same 19th century Zulu
natives Campbell and Stanton had plagiarized it from. And, because Pete Seeger and the
Richmond organization well understood that, it never did come to court.
The trouble was, whether you call it "Wimoweh" or "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", the tune that
sits under those words wasn't a traditional Zulu work chant. It was the melodic inspiration of
one man who, unlike "Paul Campbell" and "Albert Stanton", actually existed. And we can date
the point of creation very precisely, to the third take on a recording session at Eric Gallo's
studio in Johannesburg 68 years ago. As the South African writer Rian Malan described it:
Once upon a time, a long time ago, a small miracle took place in the brain of a man
named Solomon Linda. It was 1939, and he was standing in front of a microphone in

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the only recording studio in black Africa when it happened. He hadn't composed the
melody or written it down or anything. He just opened his mouth and out it came, a
haunting skein of fifteen notes that flowed down the wires and into a trembling
stylus that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of bees wax, which was taken to
England and turned into a record that became a very big hit in that part of Africa.
Indeed. They had to ship a lot of 78s from London to Jo'burg: it was the first African record
to sell over 100,000 copies. "Mbube", as they called it, means "the lion", and Solomon Linda
had been inspired by a childhood memory from his days herding cattle in the Zulu heartland.
''The lion was going round and round, and the lion was happy,'' said his daughter Elisabeth.
''But my father was not happy. He had been staying there since morning and he was hungry.''
In the Thirties, many young men from the rural hinterland of Natal came to Jo'burg, wound
up washing dishes or working factory shifts and living in the black shanty towns. Some of
them sang in a capella groups. But few made the splash Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds
did: very snazzy in trilbys, pinstripes and two-tone shoes, with harmonies to match, and
Solly's falsetto soaring above it all. Supervised by Eric Gallo and his sidekick Griffiths
Motsieloa (South Africa's first black record producer), "Mbube" was a three-chord chant with
minimal lyrics - "mbube" and "zimba", which boils down to "Lion! Stop!" As Rian Malan tells it:
The first take was a dud, as was the second. Exasperated, Motsieloa looked into the
corridor, dragooned a pianist, guitarist and banjo player, and tried again.
The third take almost collapsed at the outset as the unrehearsed musicians
dithered and fished for the key, but once they started cooking, the song was glory
bound. ‘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 Solomon yodelled and howled for two exhilarating minutes, occasionally
making it up as he went along. The third take was the great one, but it achieved
immortality only in its dying seconds, when Solly took a deep breath, opened his
mouth and improvised the melody that the world now associates with these words:
‘In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight..'
In South Africa, it was huge. "Mbube" became not just the name of a hit record but of an
entire vocal style - a high-voiced lead over four-part bass-heavy harmony. That, in turn,
evolved into "isicathamiya", a smoother vocal style that descended to Ladysmith Black
Mambazo and others, taking its cue from the injunction "Cothoza, bafana" - or "tread
carefully, boys". That's to say, Zulu stomping is fine in the bush, but when you're singing in
dancehalls and restaurants in Jo'burg you've got to be a little more choreographically
restrained, if only for the sake of the floorboards.
"Tread carefully, boys" is good advice for anyone in the music business. A few years after
Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds made their hit record, it came to the notice of Pete
Seeger, on the prowl for yet more authentic traditional vernacular folk music for the
Weavers. He misheard "Mbube" and transcribed it as "Wimoweh". That right there is a great
insight into the "authenticity" of the folk-music boom: the most famous Zulu word on the
planet was invented by a New York Communist in 1951. Still, Seeger was chanting all the way
to the bank. "Wimoweh" is a tune that works in any form - as big band (Jimmy Dorsey),
folk-rock (Nanci Griffith), country (Glen Campbell), Euro-easy listening (Bert Kaempfert),
kiddie-pop (*NSync), reggae (Eek-A-Mouse) military march (the New Zealand Army Band),
exotica (Yma Sumac), Yiddish (Lipa Schmeltzer), football singalong (the official theme of the
1986 England World Cup Squad - "Three lions score tonight"). And that's before we get to REM

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and They Might Be Giants and Baha Men, and, of course, The Lion King. Solomon Linda's song
has penetrated every corner of the globe. It's the most famous tune ever to have come out
of Africa.
He and his family must be multi-multi-millionaires, right? Not exactly. Linda sold it to the
Gallo record company for ten shillings: that would be about 87 cents. Tread carefully, boy. In
1962, just as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was reaching Number One around the world, he died
of kidney disease in Soweto, on the edge of Johannesburg, in a concrete hovel with a couple
of bedrooms with dirt floors covered in cow dung. He left his widow the equivalent of $22 in
the bank and unable even to afford a headstone for his grave. For the last decade he'd swept
floors and made the tea at the packing house of the Gallo company. His family lived on a
diet of maize porridge - "pap" - and chicken feet.
After Rian Malan drew attention to the plight of Solomon Linda's heirs, a few music critics
took the usual line on the subject. As Thomas R Gruning writes in Millennium Folk: American
Folk Music Since The Sixties:
Beyond the economic implications of ‘Mbube/Wimoweh', the musical development
of the song in its different versions illustrates a highly charged symbolic field in
which the violence done to Linda's original piece further reinscribes contested and
inequitable power relations between the West and Africa. That is, the issue shifts
from conventional notions of cultural imperialism to a more convoluted and
complicated process in which ‘plundering and counterfeiting of black culture' denies
the racial authenticities claimed by...
Zzzzzzz. That argument works fine with the likes of Hugo and Luigi and George Weiss.
They're Tin Pan Alley professionals, assignment men. Give Weiss a Broadway score, an Elvis
movie theme, and a Zulu chant, and it's all the same: that week's job; no more, no less. Who
knows what "authenticity" means to such a man? But the only reason the mighty-jungle boys
were able to "re-inscribe" the song in the first place is because of Pete Seeger and the other
leftie folkies.
The child of wealthy New York radicals, Seeger has always been avowedly anti-capitalist. Yet
his publisher had a deal with Gallo Music: they snaffled up the rights to "Mbube" cheap and in
return sub-licensed to Gallo the South African and Rhodesian rights to "Wimoweh". And
Seeger knew all along that Solomon Linda was the composer. He says now that back in the
Fifties he instructed his publishers to give his royalties from the song to Linda, and he was
shocked, shocked to discover decades later that they hadn't in fact been doing so. Evidently,
it never occurred to him, as an unworldly anti-capitalist, to check his royalty statements. It
was, on his part, supposedly a sin of omission. Whatever one thinks of that, his associates
can't plead the same accidental oversight. Having persuaded Linda to sign away his
copyright, the relevant parties made sure to slide some forms in front of his illiterate widow
in 1982 and his daughters some years later to make sure the appropriation paperwork was
kept in order.
And for all Mr Gruning's huffing about "cultural imperialism" above, it was, in the end, a
legacy of colonialism that ended the injustice. There are significant differences between US
and British copyright law, and one of them is that the latter attempts to restrain the damage
a foolish creator can do to himself. Under British Commonwealth law, the ownership in any
intellectual property reverts to the author's heirs 25 years after his death regardless of what
disadvantageous deals he may have signed. In the courtroom, the quiet courtroom, the
lawsuit slept for decades, until Solomon Linda's daughters were apprised of this significant

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feature of Commonwealth copyright law, and took action. The sleeping lion also took on the
Mouse - the Walt Disney corporation, whose film The Lion King had introduced the song to a
new generation of children. In America, Linda's family really had no legal leg to stand on,
but, faced with potentially catastrophic complications in Britain, South Africa, Australia,
India and other key markets, Disney were only too keen to settle. In 2006, Solomon Linda
finally received his due.
Fifteen improvised notes in 1939 powered Africa's biggest selling record, an entire genre of
music, and two separate hit songs on five continents. And, even though those 15 notes and
the man who wrote them were buried under all the other names that encrusted to the work,
in the end they're what shine through. Listen to the Soweto Gospel Choir's recording from a
couple of years ago, which somehow manages to capture all three versions of the song. Or go
back to Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds' original, which still sounds pretty good. Listen
to that inspiration late in take three and hear a global phenomenon being born. It took seven
decades and a lawsuit, but in the village, the peaceful village, the lion sleeps tonight.

CLOSE WINDOW

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