Musicians - Solomon Linda

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	Musicians - Solomon Linda

Solomon Linda (1909 - 8 October, 1962) was a South African Zulu musician, singer and composer who wrote the song "Mbube" which later became the pop hit "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", and gave its name to the a cappella style popularized by Ladysmith Black Mambazo

Linda was raised in the Msinga in the heartland of rural Zululand and attended the Gordon Memorial mission school. Influenced by the new syncopated music that had swept across South Africa from the US since the 1880s, he worked it into the Zulu songs he and his friends sang at weddings and feasts.

In the 1930s Linda joined the stream of young African men who left their homesteads to find menial work in Johannesburg, by then a sprawling gold-mining town hungry for cheap labour.

Linda's musical popularity grew, and in 1938 he and his band the Evening Birds - "a very cool urban act that wears pinstriped suits, bowler hats and dandy two-tone shoes" - were spotted by a talent scout. They were taken to sub-Saharan Africa's only recording studio - owned by Italian Eric Gallo, the founder of Gallo Records - to cut a number of songs.

"Mbube" was a major success for Linda and his group in 1939, reportedly selling over 100,000 copies in South Africa by 1949. The recording was produced by Griffiths Motsieloa at Gallo Studios. Linda sold the rights to Gallo Records for 10 shillings shortly after the recording was made, but under British laws then in effect, those rights should have reverted to Linda's heirs 25 years after his death in 1962.

In 1949 Linda married Regina, raised a family and continued to perform. His song "Mbube" had made him a star in South Africa.

The original South African recording was later "discovered" in the early 1950s by American musicologist Alan Lomax, who passed it on to his friend, folk musician Pete Seeger of The Weavers. Seeger retitled it "Wimoweh" (an innaccurate rendering of the song's Zulu refrain, "uyembube") and it was popularized by The Weavers; they recorded a studio version in 1952 which became a Top 20 hit in the USA, as well as an influential live version recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1957, which turned the song into a folk music staple. The Weavers' version was subsequently covered by The Kingston Trio in 1959.

The Weavers' Carnegie Hall version was also the inspiration for the 1961 version recorded by pop group The Tokens, for whom it was extensively re-written by George Weiss and retitled "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"; this is the version most people are familiar with.

Despite the popularity and wide use of the song, Mr. Linda died in poverty in 1962 of renal failure. In 2000 South African journalist Rian Malan wrote a feature article for Rolling Stone magazine, highlighting Linda's story and estimating that the song had earned US $15 million for its use in The Lion King alone, this prompted the PBS television documentary "The Lion's Trail". In 2004, with the backing of the South African government and Gallo Records, Linda's descendents brought a lawsuit in South Africa against the US company The Walt Disney Company for its use in The Lion King movie and musical without paying royalties to them.

In February 2006 Linda's heirs reached a legal settlement with Abilene Music, who held the worldwide rights and had licensed the song to Disney. This settlement applies to worldwide rights, not just South African, since 1987. The money will go into a trust, to be administered by SA Music Rights CEO Nick Motsatsi.

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