Internationally renowned SAfrican author Rian Malan has researched & written a remarkable expose for Rolling Stone magazine in the USA, on the murky side of music's international mainstream. It's about SAfrican singer-songwriter Soloman Linda - The man who recorded & composed Mbube (aka - The Lion Sleeps Tonight / Whimaway / In the Jungle, etc.).
Part 1 of a 3 part series that follows the fate of a great song-writer who 'sold' his soul & song to Gallo Africa for a few Guinness - when technically & morally he should have earned approx. $10 Million dollars (US)!!! Some say $15 Million for a song that could have been to SAfrica what 'Waltzing Matilda' is to Australia - Goodness forbid!! But you know what we mean... the fact is that's how the American's & Europeans would listen to it if they knew where it belonged. Many American & British composers have claimed the copyright to MBUBE over the past 50 odd hidden years. It's about time that we get to know a little of our own history & dig our own roots. This all relates to the SA music in crisis article by Angus Kerr and his contention that East Coast Radio and the other Top Forty American Formatted Radio Stations in Africa need to show a little more interest in where, and how, they live!
In The Junglehttp://www.3rdearmusic.com/forum/mbube2.htmlIt is one of the great musical mysteries of all time: How American music legends made millions off the work of a Zulu tribesman who died a pauper. After six decades, the truth is finally told.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, a small miracle took place in the brain of a man named Solomon Linda. It was 1939, and he was standing in front of a microphone in the only recording studio in black Africa when it happened. He hadn't composed the melody or written it down or anything. He just opened his mouth and out it came, a haunting skein of fifteen notes that flowed down the wires and into a trembling stylus that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of bees wax, which was taken to England and turned into a record that became a very big hit in that part of Africa.
Later, the song took flight and landed in America, where it mutated into a truly immortal pop epiphany that soared to the top of the charts here and then everywhere, again and again, returning every decade or so under different names and guises. Navajo Indians sing it at powwows. Japanese teenagers know it as TK. ____________ Phish perform it live. Cybersurfers recognize it as the theme song of a hugely popular British website. It has been recorded by artists as diverse as R.E.M. and Glen Campbell, Brian Eno and Chet Atkins, the Nylons and ___ schlockmeister Bert Kaempfert. The New Zealand army band turned it into a march. England's 1986 World Cup soccer squad turned it into a joke. Hollywood put it in Ace Ventura Pet Detective. It has logged nearly three centuries of continuous radio air play in the U.S. alone. It is the most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa, a tune that has penetrated so deep into the human consciousness over so many generations that one can truly say, here is a song the whole world knows.
- much more . . .
http://www.3rdearmusic.com/forum/mbube2.html
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