Mbube

The story

Solomon Linda was born in rural Natal and, as a migrant worker and beer hall singer, founded the a cappella choir the Evening Birds after an earlier group of that name dissolved in 1933. In Johannesburg he worked as a packer at Eric Gallo's record-pressing plant, the only one in black Africa, and the firm's talent scout brought the choir into the studio, where companies sought Zulu close-harmony singing to sell to migrant mineworkers. At their second session, in 1939, the group recorded "Mbube" without rehearsal in three takes, with Peter Rezant on guitar and Emily Motsieloa on piano. The song was a Zulu retelling of a lion-hunting incident, sung in four-part call and response over a three-chord progression drawn from the marabi cycle, ending in a brief falsetto howl by Linda.

"Mbube" sold over 100,000 copies in Africa over the next nine years; the historian Veit Erlmann calls it the first South African "hit". It shaped the isicathamiya style of male choral singing in the migrant workers' hostels, and the word mbube became a name for that style. Linda earned almost nothing from it. Just after the session he sold his rights to Eric Gallo for ten shillings; he could not read and did not understand royalties, and a South African court would later deem the deal unfair. He collapsed onstage in 1959 with kidney failure and died three years later aged 53, with about $40 in today's money in his bank account; his family could not afford a tombstone.

Gallo later sent records to Decca in the United States, where Alan Lomax saved "Mbube" from being discarded and gave it to Pete Seeger. Seeger misheard the chorus as "wimoweh", and the Weavers released "Wimoweh" in December 1951; it reached No. 6 in the US. The publisher, the Richmond Organization, treated it as a folk song and credited a fictitious "Paul Campbell", and none of the royalties went to Linda, though Seeger protested and once sent a $1,000 cheque himself. In 1961 George David Weiss reworked the song for the Brooklyn doo-wop group the Tokens, turning Linda's closing improvisation into the main tune and adding English words. Released in October 1961 as a B-side, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" reached No. 1 in the US and several other countries, again with no credit to Linda.

By the mid-2000s some 150 artists had recorded the song, among them Karl Denver, Robert John (No. 3 in the US, 1971) and Tight Fit (No. 1 in the UK, 1982), and it was used in Disney's The Lion King (1994) and the 1997 stage musical. In 1971 the Richmond Organization acknowledged "Wimoweh" as based on "Mbube", and in a 1990s case a court ordered Weiss's team to send ten percent of the performance royalties of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" to Linda's family. Their earnings stayed small: Rian Malan's essay in Rolling Stone in 2000 estimated that the song had earned some $15 million, while Linda's daughters lived in poverty, and five of his eight children had died.

In July 2004, backed by the South African government and with Gallo paying their legal fees, the family sued Disney for 10 million rand. Their lawyer, Owen Dean, argued that under the Copyright Act 1911 the rights had reverted to Linda's heirs 25 years after his death. Shortly before the trial set for February 2006, the case was settled: Abilene Music agreed to pay royalties from 1987 and a share of future income until 2017, and Linda was acknowledged as co-composer of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". The case set a precedent for heirs in former British colonies where the Act was law. "Mbube" fell into the public domain in South Africa in 2012. The settlement lapsed in 2017, before the 2019 remake of The Lion King used the song. Linda's story was told in François Verster's documentary A Lion's Trail (2002) and Netflix's ReMastered: The Lion's Share (2019), and it helped inspire Beyoncé's film Black Is King (2020), which uses the original "Mbube".

What it says

A song on the theme of a lion hunt. Its mood is rousing: low chanting voices beneath a high, improvised falsetto.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.