Seeking justice for Lion Sleeps Tonight composer
It is arguably the world’s most famous song about a lion – and for more than eight decades it has made a lot of money for many people around the world.
But the composer of the catchy tune, South African Solomon Linda, died destitute in 1962.
While US artists were at loggerheads over the lucrative melody, he had been in and out of hospitals and suffering from kidney failure.
His song was brought up as an example of complicated copyright cases during a masterclass course taken by Chanetsa at the Academy of Sound Engineering in Johannesburg earlier this year.
His lecturers recommended that he watch the 2019 Netflix documentary ReMastered: The Lion’s Share about the origins of the song and the battle to get fair compensation for Linda’s descendants.
It featured South African writer Rian Malan, who first began campaigning on the issue with an article in Rolling Stone in 2000 revealing the genesis of the melody by Linda and his Zulu acapella singers and how it grew into a hit for many groups around the world – including in Disney’s 1994 film The Lion King.
Yet Malan revealed Linda’s family still lived in poverty having received only a small sum from one publishing company.
It drove him to do his own research as Linda recorded the original in 1939 with his group the Evening Birds at Gallo Records in Johannesburg where he worked as record packer.
“I found out that the actual song that was [first] made was out of copyright. It is now in what we call ‘public domain’, and that’s when the whole journey started,” Chanetsa said.
He decided that he wanted to organise an arrangement of the song that could correct some of the injustices of the past.
Linda, who improvised some of the tune in the studio, was paid for 10 shillings for the recording, so did not profit when it became a local hit in the 1940s.
Then the track took on a life of its own when it was adapted by the US folk group The Weavers in 1951.
Their version was called Wimoweh, a mishearing of the original lyrics of the chorus “Uyimbube”, meaning “You’re a lion” in Zulu.
According to Malan, the lyrics were inspired by memories of the singers’ cattle herding days as young boys – remembering how a lion on the prowl had been chased away.
‘We never read contracts’
The following decade, American lyricist George David Weiss was asked to arrange the song for doo-wop band The Tokens – and he added the English lyrics: “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight.”
This version of the song known as The Lion Sleeps Tonight went to number one, remains in copyright – and continues to be the subject of legal battles.
