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.
#Who sang wimoweh 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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