![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He did, however, receive royalties from Folkways Records, home of Seeger and Woody Guthrie, which owned the music copyright to "Mbube/Wimoweh" outside of South Africa. The song, which topped the Billboard singles charts for three weeks in 1961, sold over two million copies and has earned millions more since. But they obviously knew what they were doing." "Our producers wrote the English lyrics, which I was frankly embarrassed by. "We thought it was cool," recalls Medress. According to former Token Hank Medress, a former executive of EMI Publishing Canada and now a 56-year- old aspiring physical fitness director in New York, it was the Weavers' version of "Wimoweh" that first inspired his group. The song then came to be known as "Wimoweh," made famous by Miriam Makeba and later by Pete Seeger and The Weavers. Those parts were taken from "Mbube," a Zulu hunting song written in 1939 by black South African choir leader Solomon Linda. The song owes its success to the stirring vocal parts, a chanting chorus and a keening falsetto, that have helped to make it a campfire favorite the world over. Which is why BMG has rushed out a Tokens collection titled - you guessed it, The Lion Sleeps Tonight. Now, due to its inclusion in Disney's The Lion King, the song has become a hit all over again. More than 80 versions have been recorded to date, by everyone from Canadian a cappella guys the Nylons to British ambient guru Brian Eno. So how to explain the longevity of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," which made Brooklyn's The Tokens a one-hit wonder in the '60s? Despite its trite lyrics ("In the jungle, the mighty jungle," etc.) the song simply refuses to die. Goode," now hurtling somewhere out in space aboard the Voyager II, will become a hit on Neptune when it reaches the planet sometime in the next millennium. For all we know, Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. And the raunchy Latino standard "La Bamba" has been sanctified by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, no less. The Gipsy Kings, for instance, do Sinatra's signature tune "My Way" their way. Infused with musical elixir, they transcend time and space and even their original language. ![]()
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