Mbube wimoweh4/7/2023 At the time of his death, he was impoverished and his family saved up for 18 years to finally afford a tombstone for his grave. After collapsing on stage in 1959, Linda was diagnosed with kidney disease and died in 1962. The song went on to sell over 100,000 copies in South Africa alone and made Linda a star.Īlthough Solomon Linda was a popular performer in South Africa, he received little compensation for his worldwide hit, either in his home country, or from Pete Seeger and the many other Westerners who went on to record “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. Linda and his group improvised Mbube during a lull in one of these sessions and sold the rights to it for less than two dollars shortly thereafter. The group became very popular in Johannesburg and were eventually discovered by a talent scout who helped them to get time in the only recording studio in Sub-Saharan Africa. At 19, he moved to Johannesburg, got a job working for his uncle, and started a vocal group of his own called Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds. He heard an African choir sing at his school and was inspired to incorporate the musical language of ragtime into the traditional Zulu songs he knew. While there he was exposed to ragtime music and especially the rags of composer Scott Joplin. The Weavers never credited Solomon Linda as the writer and his heirs tried for years to pursue royalties from the song that eventually become one of the most recognized songs worldwide.īorn in the Msinga rural area of what was called Zululand in 1909, Solomon Linda received his early education from the Gordon Memorial Mission School. Seeger’s group, The Weavers adapted it and it became a Top 15 hit. He took the records to Pete Seeger, the American folk singer, who loved Mbube, and especially the refrain, which sounded to him like “awimoweh”. Although Decca wasn’t interested, folk historian Alan Lomax was. The South African record label who recorded it sent the song, along with other 78s to Decca Records in the US. This song had such a huge impact on Zulu culture that all Zulu choral music later became referred to as “Mbube Music” and the original song became considered a folk hit. ![]() The words, written by Solomon Linda, depict a boyhood experience of his chasing lions that were stalking his family’s cattle. The song was a huge hit in the area now called Swaziland, and sold almost 100,000 copies in the 1940s. The haunting refrain sounded to English-speaking people like “wimoweh”, but they’re actually singing Mbube. Mbube (pronounced EEM-boo-beh) means “lion” and was originally a Zulu song. I had no idea I would know this song when I started listening to it, and had always assumed it was written by some white westerners to be an “African-themed” song that someone could make some money off of. ![]() ![]() This song has been very interesting to research because of its history.
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