I met him in the lobby and said, ‘If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be here.’ And he knew who I was of course. Pete Seeger was one of the members of The Weavers. “So, one day we came in and sang – it was not ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight.’ It was a song I heard on the radio taken from an album called The Weavers in Carnegie Hall, the biggest vocal group of the ’50s.” Jay Siegel first heard the song by the folk purists The Weavers, best known today for their first recording “Goodnight Irene” done originally by Lead Belly. 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.’”īy 1948, “Mbube” had sold in the region of 100,000 copies, and Solomon Linda was the undefeated and undefeatable champion of hostel singing competitions and a superstar in the world of Zulu migrants. Rolling Stone described the song as “a simple three-chord ditty with lyrics something along the lines of, ‘Lion! Ha! You’re a lion!’ inspired by an incident in the Evening Birds’ collective Zulu boyhood when they chased lions that were stalking their father’s cattle. He sang soprano, what Zulus called fasi pathi, a blood-curdling falsetto. Standing almost seven feet tall, Linda recorded “Mbube,” in the only recording studio in black Africa with his group Evening Birds wearing pinstriped suits, bowler hats and dandy two-tone shoes. Solomon Linda is said to have been inspired by the celebrated Virginia Jubilee Singers, a 19 th century combo that specialized in syncopated spirituals. Each iteration puts a twist on a song that owes its genesis to the primal calls of the African jungle.
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Rolling Stone called it the most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa, stating in 2000 there were around 160 recordings of three versions, 13 movies, half a dozen TV commercials, a hit play, and “ceaseless radio airplay in every corner of the planet.”Ī sleeping giant, it has awakened anew every few years for more than 80 years across cultures and defying genres.
Then it sold about three million records in the United States, was released all over the world and became a number one record in 36 countries all over the world.” They released it, and within four weeks it became number one in the country, stayed on the charts for about three months. “They went into The Animal Kingdom, and what record do they play? They’re playing my record. “My son just took his two kids to Disney World for vacation,” says Siegel today. It has been covered by everyone from Pete Seeger and The Weavers, Miriam Makeba, R.E.M., Brian Eno, The Kingston Trio, Glen Campbell, and the Spinners to name a few, and was featured in the 1994 Walt Disney film The Lion King where it is sung by Timon the meerkat (Nathan Lane) and Pumba the warthog (Ernie Sabella). It first made the charts in 1939 by a South African singer named Solomon Linda.
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