It sounds less like the doo-wop of its moment, more like a broadcast from some much older civilization - which, if you look at the song’s whole history, is basically what it is. (For a much better and longer version of the song’s story, read this great story that Rian Malan wrote for Rolling Stone in 2000.)īy the time it reached its final form, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” had gone through a few different layers of translation, and it had been thoroughly Americanized, but it remains a deeply weird song, a cascade of falsetto howls over a pulsating chant and a timpani roll. And that’s what eventually got to #1, decades after the first version of the song had been improvised in the studio. And that’s what he did, giving it near-gibberish lyrics about a lion sleeping in the jungle. But the song didn’t strike the Tokens’ producers as a pop song, so they hired songwriter George David Weiss to turn it into one. Nearly a decade later, the Tokens, group of Jewish teenagers from Brooklyn who sang doo-wop, were figuring out what to record after scoring a top-20 hit with their single “Tonight I Fell In Love.” (Neil Sedaka, who’d get to #1 in 1962 with “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do,” was an original Token, but he’d left the group by this time.) Tokens leader Jay Siegel knew “Wimoweh” from the Weavers record, and he wanted to record it. (It remains probably the strongest vocal I’ve ever heard from Seeger.) “Wimoweh” became a national hit in 1952, just before Seeger was blacklisted as a Communist, effectively killing the Weavers’ career. He couldn’t understand the lyrics, so he sang them phonetically when he and his band the Weavers adapted the song, giving it the new title “Wimoweh.” “Wimoweh” was a part of the Weavers’ live show for years before they recorded it, with Seeger singing the living hell out of these words that he couldn’t understand. Seeger loved the song, and he tried to sing it himself. A vinyl copy of “Mbube” ended up in the hands of the famous folklorist Alan Lomax, who played it for his friend, the folksinger Pete Seeger.
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