Disney A to G(#) — Part Four: The Lion King Completes a Circle

Two composers, almost a century apart, meet in a Disney film.

Simba, Pumbaa and Timon in The Lion King (1994) — Credit:Disney

The Prelude — What We Mean When We Say “Africa”

The African continent is not monolithic.

It contains 54 countries and numerous distinct cultures and languages. We have to be careful when describing a movie like Disney’s The Lion King (1994) as being “set in Africa.” The story of Simba’s fall and then rise to power would mean something very specific, for example, were it set in the African nation of Egypt, and something different again were it set in Ethiopia.

The visual clues given by the filmmakers suggest that the action takes place in an amalgam of the equatorial nations near or at the eastern coast of the continent, particularly Kenya, with its Hell’s Gate National Park being prominently represented, but the film never specifies.

The music of Africa is likewise non-monolithic. Kenya’s many disparate folk traditions of primarily string-based music contrast sharply with South Africa’s more amalgamated drum and choral folk music.

Hans Zimmer’s influential score to the 1994 film looked to the internationally better known music of South Africa than to the more geographically appropriate music of Kenya and its surrounding nations. This may have been in part because westerners are more familiar with South African music given the rise of musicians like Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba in the ’80s and ’90s (not to mention Paul Simon’s repurposing of that music in his hit album Graceland), and it is also likely that the dramatic drumming and often guttural choral work of this music was appealing due to its a built-in sense of drama; but most likely he incorporated it because it was the band he had at the time. Zimmer had recently finished work on the score of the South African film The Power of One (1992), and his relationships with those musicians, in particular singer and composer Lebo M, seemed an obvious carryover to the Disney film.

So that’s our blurry perspective, we’re looking at Kenya (and Tanzania and Zambia) through the musical lens of South Africa and Germany (Zimmer) and Great Britain (Tim Rice/Elton John) and the United States (Disney). Given that mélange, we find only one iconically African song from anyplace on the continent in The Lion King score.

This is the story of that song — probably, to western audiences, the most well-known South African melody — and how the South African composer of a much later melody — perhaps the second most well-known — made his way back to the first.

Let’s back up…

Early Promotional Photo of Solomon Linda and His Original Evening Birds

The First Movement — Not A Lion, THE Lion

In 1938, an Italian immigrant to South Africa named Eric Gallo was in the process of transforming his business from importing American hillbilly records to a legitimate recording and producing label. Searching for local talent to record, he found that a 29-year-old man who had been employed in his stock room, packing 78s, was fronting a small vocal group and thought he would give them a try.

The repercussions of the music that came out of that session can still be felt today, but the record-packing composer and lead vocalist, Solomon Linda, remained all but unknown outside of South Africa for most of the 20th Century.

The song that Solomon Linda and His Original Evening Birds recorded that day was called Mbube, but you probably know it by what it was re-titled later when performed by Timon and Pumba in the film and stage versions of Disney’s The Lion King: The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

Solomon Linda was from the British-occupied Natal colony, which is now absorbed into the Republic of South Africa, and he grew up not only with traditional Zulu vocal harmonies, but had also studied Western choral hymn forms at a local missionary school.

Like many men of the tribal areas, Linda had to travel into the townships, in this case Johannesburg, for extended periods in order to find work. At the time, it was primarily men who were forced into these migrations, and so, in order to fill out the missing female vocal parts when performing, a tradition of male falsetto singing became ingrained in the musical styles of the transplanted performers when showing off their home village’s vocalese to the city dwellers.

Linda was a talented vocal arranger, and in the session that produced Mbube, he was working on the fly. Almost entirely improvised in the recording studio, Linda coached his group to sing the now familiar “uyimbube, uyimbube” backing chant while he sang his falsetto over it.

Not happy with the first two takes, Linda pulled in several musicians waiting outside for the next recording session. He began adding harmonies, doubling up the bass part, and refining his melodic line. By the third take, they had it: a song loosely about a cowherd killing a lion with a fascinating and irresistible harmony. It was a mix of both Zulu and western vocal forms entwined together in a way that no one ever had before.

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The recording exploded in South Africa, changing the landscape of the country’s music. The vocal music that dominated that part of the African continent for many decades became known as “mbube.” Ladysmith Black Mambazo, perhaps the most famous of the modern “traditional” South African vocal bands to reach western ears, sings a form of mbube. The world music renaissance in Europe and America that began in the 1980s was drenched in mbube and its antecedents mbaqanga and isicathamiya.

Solomon Linda, with no understanding of how the music business worked, sold the rights to his song for what amounts to about $2 today.

The Weavers performing live.

The Second Movement — Misheard Lyrics and Imaginary Composers

Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax were roommates in 1951. Seeger (who you may have recently seen as played by Edward Norton in the Academy Award-nominated film A Complete Unknown (2024)) was a member of The Weavers: the pre-eminent folk group of the ’50s folk music revival. Lomax was one of the most prolific recorders and archivists of American rural music. Both were connected to Decca Records, which was in turn connected to Eric Gallo’s South African record label.

Lomax found a box of sides from Gallo’s label sitting in the Decca offices and brought them home for Pete to sift through. Seeger, coming off The Weavers' first number one hit with their recording of Leadbelly’s Goodnight, Irene was looking for a follow-up, and he found something in Solomon Linda’s recording of Mbube that interested him.

Mishearing the backing chat of “uyimbube” (meaning: “You’re the lion”) as “wimoweh” (meaning: well… nothing), Seeger put an arrangement together with the band. This was a strange period for The Weavers, where their songs were being framed with a large band accompaniment from the Gordon Jenkins Orchestra. In spite of the awkward setting, the band laid down an effective version of the song they were now calling Wimoweh.

The recording took the backing chant and opening falsetto almost verbatim. It also took a little descant that Linda had improvised at the end of the song and prettied it up to make it a new major theme. At this point, the song was a few notes and a set of lyrics away from being the song we hear in The Lion King.

Seeger’s new version of the song earned him an authorship credit, but he also insisted on a credit for the mysterious original author, Solomon Linda. Linda, having no real rights to the song he had written as far as the American record label was concerned, received a parenthetical credit next to a pseudonym that the label was using to park themselves on top of the song publishing rights. The credit read, “Based on a song by Solomon Linda and Paul Campbell” which was a particularly insulting byline not only because Wimoweh wasn’t “based on” Mbube, it WAS Mbube with a different arrangement and a misheard lyric, but also because Paul Campbell didn’t exist and yet, of the two of them, he was the only one that got paid.

Decca had no real connection to Solomon Linda, and it didn’t behoove Gallo to foster one for them, so Pete Seeger’s request that Linda receive some of the royalties got nowhere. Pete Seeger might well have pursued it, but he suddenly had much bigger trouble on his hands.

Pete Seeger testifying to the Senate HUAC Committee

Pete Seeger and The Weavers had done a lot of work supporting workers rights and labor unions, and they found themselves targeted by Joseph McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities. Seeger and fellow-Weaver Lee Hayes were brought before the Senate committee. Both refused to sell out anyone else by naming names to the committee, and the entire group refused to sign an anti-communist pledge, leading to a blacklisting of the band.

Wimoweh, at number 6 on the charts, began to plummet as radio refused to play it and the band was no longer allowed to play live at most major venues. The Weavers struggled on for a few more years — no record label, controversy at every stop, smaller and smaller venues — until something remarkable happened: their manager somehow booked them at Carnegie Hall. McCarthy and his HUAC cronies were beginning to lose their grip on power, and the concert-bookers at Carnegie were making a point. Wimoweh featured prominently in the set, and The Weavers had a resurgence of popularity. They would never again have a number one record, though.

The Weavers eventually broke up, reuniting one last time in 1980 for a final concert; again, at Carnegie Hall.

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They opened that last show with a fierce rendition of Wimoweh. If you watch the film of that performance (The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time), you will see Ronnie Gilbert making a pointed statement about the origins of the song by seemingly alternating back and forth between singing their version of the chant and the original “uyimbube.”

Solomon Linda had yet to get paid, but he had not been entirely forgotten, either.

The Tokens — 1960s Doo-Wop Group

The Third Movement — The Song Gets Its Lion Back

It was 1961, and The Tokens were an up-and-coming Brooklyn doo-wop band. Their label, RCA Victor, was trying to capitalize on their ascent by hooking them together with major, hit-making producers Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore. As an audition piece for the veteran producers, the four teens sang their version of Wimoweh, which they had learned off of a Weavers record.

The two producers liked the kids and the song as well, but realized that it needed some work, so they reached out to George Weiss — co-writer of Elvis’ most treacly hit, Can’t Help Falling in Love With You — and told him to take Wimoweh and see what he could do with it. Weiss rearranged some of the already existing pieces and wrote some lyrics.

“In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight!”

Solomon Linda’s improvisational melody at the end of Mbube had moved more to the forefront when The Weavers adapted it. The Tokens and George Weiss added a final few notes that closed off the phrase and made it the melody for the sung lyrics.

The producers, the band, and George Weiss didn’t think much of the recording, however, and buried it on a B-side of a single. The song had other ideas.

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The Lion Sleeps Tonight became a juggernaut. Topping charts in several countries, covered over and over by other performers — the late Brian Wilson is said to have pulled his car over in astonishment when he heard it — the song has stayed a fixture of popular culture since its release and has made hundreds of millions of dollars in recording sales and song publishing.

But wait, song publishing by… who? Solomon Linda hadn’t seen profit from his song since he composed, arranged and performed it originally. George Weiss’ lyrics were new, and Linda’s improvised descant had found a few extra notes to finish it off, but otherwise it was still Linda’s music. Not that you’d have known it when The Tokens’ version had taken off.

George Weiss, Hugo Peretti, and Luigi Creatore were familiar with the “Paul Campbell” pseudonym that had sat next to Solomon Linda’s parenthetical credit and assumed that its presence meant that Wimoweh was a traditional song and that they could claim authorship in the same way that Pete Seeger, reluctantly, had. It wasn’t traditional, though, a man had written it and the rights were owned by somebody; maybe not the person who wrote it, but by somebody.

A legal battle ensued between the part of Decca that was “Paul Campbell” and Weiss, Peretti, and Creatore over authorship of the song that none of them had authored. Everyone walked away with a slice… except for Solomon Linda, who passed away around this time.

Opening scene of The Lion King (1994)

The Fourth Movement — The Circle Closes

It would be hard to say how many lives Mbube has had, but the most lucrative was in its surprising re-emergence in one of the most financially successful properties that The Walt Disney Company ever created: The Lion King. The song pops up — almost as a throwaway, a novelty — in the 1994 animated film, as well as in the hugely successful Broadway production (which continues to play all around the world) and in the 2019 live action/CGI remake which has made the second most money (after Inside Out 2) of any animated film to date, and the fifth most of any film in the history of the company.

Given the extraordinary amount of money that was flowing around this blockbuster, surely a bit could be spared for Solomon Linda, given the use of The Lion Sleeps Tonight in the film, not to mention the massive influence that his song had had on the style of South African music used extensively to texture the film’s soundtrack. Right?

Lawsuits were filed on behalf of Linda’s surviving family. Legally, Disney didn’t have to pay Linda’s family, but lawyers hoped that the optics would be bad enough to do something. Disney made an undisclosed settlement, which seems to have not amounted to enough to pull the family out of destitution. The Lindas still couldn’t afford to fix their leaking tin roof.

Pete Seeger, a few years later, discovered that the royalties he had asked to be sent to the Linda family over the years had never gone there. Dismayed, he sent the Lindas $12,000, which was, according to Solomon Linda’s eldest daughter, the most money the family had ever seen.

By 2003, however, the tides were finally turning for the Linda family after the publication of an explosive article written in Rolling Stone magazine about the song’s lineage and the state of the Linda family, as well as due to an Afrikaner lawyer, Hanro Friedrich, who devoted hundreds of free hours to help Linda’s daughters. These efforts led to not only a reinstatement of much of the authorship rights to the song but also a new scrutiny over international copyright law.

Lebo M — Credit: Showmax

And this brings us to Lebo M.

Hans Zimmer had worked with M on the film The Power of One and recognized the brilliance of the South African composer/arranger/singer. Lebo’s sophisticated understanding of South African choral music, particularly mbube and its gentler descendant, isicathamiya, as well as his background in gospel music, reveal him as a profound stop in a direct line of Solomon Linda’s musical lineage.

Lebo M arranged all of the South African choral parts and many of the instruments for The Lion King, but the thing we all know him for is a single vocal melody — probably the second most famous to migrate from South Africa to the west — that he composed and performed. You know what is:

[embed]Lebo M Performs The Circle of Life Live

In retrospect, it is hard to ignore the parallels between Lebo M’s work on The Lion King and Solomon Linda’s famous recording.

Linda improvised the famous melody over a few takes with little rehearsal. The word “uyimbube” indicates not just any lion, but is a Zulu language construct indicating respect: THE lion, perhaps the King of Lions.

Similarly, according to Lebo M he was called in to a studio by Hans Zimmer to look over some early music for the project. He had no knowledge about the movie other than the notes Zimmer gave him that day and some concept art that had been pinned to the wall:

“As I was leaving the studio I saw the image (Mufasa), heard the cords [sic] and progressions and I was really into this thing. So I said, ‘turn the mic back on.’ And then I said what I normally would or quite frankly what any South African normally would (in the presence of a king) except I vocalized it. The psychology and the emotion of it is ‘All hail the King’ and all bow down in the presence of the royal family.” — Blackfilm.com

This first, improvised, take of the chant is the recording that appears in the film.

Their areas of expertise also have some overlap. Linda arranged Mbube’s, and, indeed, all of the Evening Birds’ backing vocals. Likewise Lebo M wrote and arranged all of the South African choral backing — changing the character of much of the already excellent score and songs — for the film.

And the question of authorship, the constant undercurrent of this story, shows history, if not repeating itself, rhyming. While the original recording of Mbube is credited to Solomon Linda’s Original Evening Birds, he wouldn’t be credited again for his song until Pete Seeger’s pressure forced “Based on a song by Solomon Linda and Paul Campbell” in 1961. This credit was barely a footnote, which he shared with a pseudonym, and which always appeared under the names of other people who were listed as the “actual” composers.

Though there are pieces of both the songs and score to the movie that are purely Lebo M, and other aspects of the music that are fundamentally changed by his contribution, he gets no composer credit on the original Lion King soundtrack. (In fact, the use of The Lion Sleeps Tonight gives Solomon Linda more of a compositional credit in The Lion King than Lebo M gets, albeit in its parenthetical “based on” version.) Hans Zimmer, Elton John, and Tim Rice receive the entirety of the original music credit. (Hey, at least these guys exist and DID write a bunch of great music! It’s better than being teamed up with imaginary Paul Campbell!)

South African Postage Stamp Commemorating Solomon Linda

Solomon Linda, scrappy and poor, was a very different person than Lebo M is, but they share a musical lineage. M, however, was able to leverage his impact on the Lion King soundtrack to become a consistent and celebrated musical presence across all of the Lion King-related, and many other unrelated films; as a singer, arranger, and composer. Solomon Linda toured his Evening Birds around Johannesburg, and he was able to make a few more, well respected, recordings, but died poor a few decades after he had altered the trajectory of South African music.

If there were any doubt as to whether Lebo M understands his relationship to the work of Solomon Linda, it was erased in 2019 when he was hired to spread some of his magic across the blockbuster Lion King remake, the end credit sequence held a surprise performance from the South African maestro: Lebo M performs Mbube.

Not The Lion Sleeps Tonight. Not Wimoweh. Solomon Linda’s Mbube.

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Lebo M salutes the great originator, Solomon Linda, the composer who saw a new direction for South African vocal music and, in a flash of inspiration, laid the first stone of a path that Lebo M would be walking almost a century later.

A beautiful tribute, Lebo M draws the musical circle closed, reaching back to hold the hand of the Lion of South African music, Solomon Linda.

Exit Music

I like to close these with some bits and bobs that are, I think, interesting, but didn’t really fit in the story.

Gordon Jenkins, who arranged the big band part of The Weavers' version of Wimoweh had spent many years writing songs for radio with a man named Tom Adair. Adair would, later in his career, write a number of songs for The Mickey Mouse Club as well as serve as lyricist for The Golden Horseshoe Review at Disneyland.

Jenkins also had a pianist in his band named Charlie LaVere. LaVere may have even played on The Weavers’ recording of Wimoweh. LaVere wrote the music and served as the original live pianist for *The Golden Horseshoe Review*.

One of the odder covers of Wimoweh was by the mysterious Yma Sumac. Sumac was a performer that Walt Disney was entranced by in Peru on the Latin American trip that produced Saludos Amigos (1942). In 1987, Sumac recorded a cover of I Wonder for the Stay Awake Disney songs cover project.

Yma Sumac — The Voice of the Xtabay

This article, like all of the ones in this series, leans heavily on the works of other creators. Here are a few of the major ones:

And the Roots of Rhythm Remain — Joe Boyd’s epic dive into global music and the history of how it affects what we listen to now. I’m not kidding when I say that there’s a ground-shifting revelation on just about every one of its 900+ pages.

Jim Brown’s soul-soothing film about The Weavers’ 1980 reunion, The Weavers — Wasn’t That a Time, ranks amongst the best concert films ever made. It’s a little tough to find these days, but well worth checking your library to see if they have a copy.

Rian Malan’s Rolling Stone article from 2000 has done more to expose what happened to Solomon Linda than anyone had before. It goes into a lot more detail about the money and actually did a lot towards getting Linda’s family justice. While some of the history has been revised since he wrote it, it’s a masterful piece of journalism.

This 2019 interview with Lebo M from the Blackfilm.com site has proven invaluable to getting the origin story of his famous improvised “Lion King” recording.

Special thanks to my editor and friend, Zach Perilstein, who suggested I look a little harder at Lebo M, which gave this story the connective glue it had needed all along.

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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times