Related Artists - Cross Country, Dusk, United States Double Quartet.Īvailability - In Stock - Buy Now for shipping today Irrespective of the source, all of our collectables meet our strict grading and are 100% guaranteed. We buy items as close to Mint condition as possible and many will be unplayed and as close to new as you could hope to find. Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) - 5053199221867Ĭondition - This item is in Excellent condition or better (unless it says otherwise in the above description). Language - Regardless of country of origin all tracks are sung in English, unless otherwise stated in our description. Title - The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh) (click link for more of the same title)įormat - 7" vinyl single (7 inch record / 45) Including Tina, RCA company die cut paper sleeveĪrtist - The Tokens (click link for complete listing) This post The Number Ones: The Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” first appeared on Stereogum.THE TOKENS The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh) (Classicġ961 UK 7" vinyl single with intact four prong centre, also
Even divorced from its fascinating history, it’s a perfect song, a dive into some pop-music dreamworld.īONUS BEATS: Here, of course, are Timon and Pumba covering “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” in The Lion King: But it doesn’t take anything away from the liquid, incandescent weird-pop joy of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which just might be the greatest novelty song ever to reach #1. It’s a sad story, and a sadly predictable one. In 2006, more than 40 years after his death, Linda’s family won a settlement from the publishers of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Seeger once sent him a $1,000 check after realizing that he hadn’t been getting royalties, but that was it. Linda should’ve become a millionaire for writing the song instead, he died broke. Nobody ever thought to pay Solomon Linda songwriting royalties for the song, and most of the people who sang versions of it assumed that it was a public-domain traditional. The story of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” is, of course, a story of deep music-business fuckery. Most of the people involved in putting together and selling “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” probably heard it as a weird little novelty - it started out as a B-side before radio DJs championed it - but it ended up resonating on some deeper level, and it’s been rattling around in the pop consciousness ever since. 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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