Episode ninety-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" by The Tokens, and at a seventy-year-long story of powerful people repeatedly ripping off less powerful people, then themselves being ripped off in turn by more powerful people, and at how racism meant that a song that earned fifteen million dollars for other people paid its composer ten shillings. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Tossin' and Turnin'" by Bobby Lewis.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

ERRATUM: I say “Picture in Your Wallet” when I mean “Picture in My Wallet”.

Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

Rian Malan's 2000 article on Solomon Linda and The Lion Sleeps Tonight can be found here.

This 2019 article brings the story of the legal disputes up to date.

The information about isicathamiya comes from Nightsong: Performance, Power and Practice in South Africa by Veit Erlmann.

This collection of early isicathamiya and Mbube music includes several tracks by the Evening Birds.

Information on Pete Seeger and the Weavers primarily comes from Pete Seeger vs. The Un-Americans: A Tale of the Blacklist by Edward Renehan.

This collection has everything the Weavers recorded before their first split.

This is the record of one of the legal actions taken during Weiss' dispute with Folkways in the late eighties and early nineties.

Information on the Tokens came from This is My Story.

There are, surprisingly, no budget compilations of the Tokens' music, but this best-of has everything you need.

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Transcript

Today we're going to look at a song that became a worldwide hit in multiple versions, and which I can guarantee everyone listening to this podcast has heard many times. A song that has been recorded by REM, that featured in a Disney musical, and which can be traced back from a white doo-wop group through a group of Communist folk singers to a man who was exploited by racist South African society -- a man who invented an entire genre of music, which got named after his most famous song, but who never saw any of the millions that his song earned for others, and died in poverty. We're going to look at the story of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight":

[Excerpt: The Tokens, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]

The story of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is a story that goes back to 1939, when a singer called Solomon Linda was performing in South Africa. Linda was a Zulu, and thus in the racist regime of South Africa was largely without rights.

Linda was, in the thirties and forties, probably the single most important performer in South Africa. He was the leader of a vocal group called the Evening Birds, who were the most popular isicathamiya group in South Africa.

Isicathamiya -- and I hope I'm pronouncing that right -- was a form of music which has a lot of parallels to some of the American vocal group music we've looked at, largely because it comes from some of the same roots. I don't pretend to be an expert on the music by any means -- I'll put a link on the podcast webpage to a book which has far more information about this -- but as best I understand it, it's a music created when rural black people were forcibly displaced in the late nineteenth century and forced to find work in the city.

Those people combined elements of traditional Zulu music with two more Western elements. The first was the religious music that they heard from Church missions, and the second was American minstrel songs, heard from troupes of minstrels that toured the c