![]() ![]() Her talents were more frequently acknowledged onstage. ![]() Darian also sang behind Mickey & Sylvia on their 1957 hit “ Love Is Strange” and recorded with Burt Bacharach, Dinah Washington, Patti Page and others, usually without credit and often emulating the eerie sound of a theremin. Darian’s high-pitched vocal - at one point soaring over the lines “In the jungle,/ the mighty jungle/ The lion sleeps tonight” - provided a memorable counterpoint to the lead vocal and the harmonized lower-register refrain “A-wimoweh-a-wimoweh.” The record spent three weeks atop the Billboard pop chart. Weiss had adapted from a South African song. Darian was a session singer and stage performer when she was asked by the producers Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore and the songwriter George David Weiss to provide backing vocals for “ The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which Mr. Lynda Wells, a longtime friend and an executor of her estate, said the cause was complications after intestinal surgery. Darian reached far more listeners with her keening, uncredited background singing on the Tokens’ 1961 hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Her versatile voice carried her there in 1960, where she sang and played kazoo with the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein’s baton. The second is that the (mostly wordless) falsetto vocals were improvised by Solomon Linda (over wonderfully sonorous and rhythmically compelling bass riffs) but it was not until near the end (about 2:22) of this, the third, take that he was inspired to produce the melody that is now universally associated with the words “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight”.For the singer Anita Darian, getting to Carnegie Hall not only took practice it also took a kazoo. Rather like King Arthur, there was a folk belief that Shaka is not dead but only sleeping and one day he will return to liberate his people from their colonial oppressors. The first is that the “lion” referred to in the song is none other than the famous Zulu king Shaka Zulu (the subject of this famous poem) who acquired legendary status after his death. There are two other fascinating things about this tune. ![]() The song was also used in the Disney film The Lion King without any royalties being paid, leading to a lawsuit brought by Linda’s surviving relatives (which was settled out of court). Solomon Linda sold the rights to the Gallo record company for just ten shillings in 1949 so never received significant income from the worldwide sales. Since then it has had more cover versions than I’ve had hot dinners, mostly with an English title The Lion Sleeps Tonight or Wimoweh, a not-entirely-accurate phonetic attempt to render the isiZulu phrase uyimbube (“you are a lion”) which occurs in the song. The song Mbube by South African singer and composer Solomon Linda was first performed in 1939 and was an immediate hit in his native land. To cut a long story short I found this, and it’s been in my head ever since so I thought I’d share it here. I couldn’t identify some of the sounds so when I came inside I started googling about for various combinations of “birds singing in the evening”. The other evening it was warm enough for me to sit out in the garden, listening to the birdsong until it got dark. And now for something completely different… ![]()
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