Arranged by hit-making producer Gordon Jenkins–with Linda’s improvised melody rendered by a string section and foregrounded–it would be the Weavers’ last top 10 hit. The Weavers are mentioned only once by name in The Lion’s Share, but it was their version that hit the American top 10 in 1952 and pushed the song towards its fate. Related: “Pete Seeger At 100: A Fresh Look” Seeger also somehow missed the fact that the title chant–“mbube”–was written right there on the record’s label, and instead chose to transliterate it into the hokum mid-century faux-African chant “wimoweh.” In one version of the story, Seeger wrote out the arrangement on cocktail napkins for his vocal quartet the Weavers during their stay at the Village Vanguard. Still, one would be hard-pressed to hear “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” in “Mbube.” The first part of that transformation was created by Pete Seeger, who heard the single for the first time about a decade later, and codified it from an improvisation into a vocal melody that recognized the song’s harmonic logic while imbuing its structure with a slightly more regular shape. It is irregular and halting, but instantly familiar. Near the end of the second take, as the group chanted the title, Linda improvised a wordless vocal melody. In 1939, Solomon Linda and His Original Evening Birds performed three takes of the song called “Mbube,” the second of which became Gallotone’s subsequent 78 rpm release. But while Solomon Linda’s family were clearly wronged in the process and deserve money for his songwriting, the reduction of “Mbube”/“Wimoweh”/“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” to its lawsuits also takes some of the magic out of the song itself. It illustrates the story with great nuance, an archetypal tale of white publishers exploiting black musicians, of the Global North abusing the Global South.
There are a number of ways to tell the story of how a song called “Mbube” became the ubiquitous “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” A recent Netflix documentary, The Lion’s Share, focuses on the legal side - the struggle of songwriter Solomon Linda’s family to reclaim the song’s lost royalties. The melody’s 80-year journey from a Johannesburg recording studio in 1939 to Disney’s virtual reality Lion King remake is one about as convoluted as a song could take over the past century, from a piece of improvisation to multi-million dollar trans-continental legal actions.
Wimoweh the weavers year movie#
“Wimoweh, a-wimoweh,” went the warthog’s bass part, a word meaningless in the Kenyan Serengeti, where the movie was set, and meaningless on the South African coast, where the song itself originated. A few years ago, on a virtual movie set on a securely locked server owned by one of the world’s largest corporations, a cartoon warthog and meerkat padded down a forest path and sang a song they both knew.
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