The trajectory of a very popular song is always interesting, particularly when it metamorphoses into something very different over the course of its journey, like a musical game of Telephone.
Take "Mbube," a 1939 song by Solomon Linda's Original Evening Birds, a South African singing group:
You may recognize it in this form, at least elements of it. Then a decade after its release, Pete Seeger heard it and recorded it with his group, The Weavers, with quite a different arrangement and a new name:
It went to No. 6 on the charts and might've climbed higher if The Weavers hadn't been under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. But covers proliferated. Among them, eight years later, was this one by The Tokens. The producer at RCA insisted it needed lyrics, so some were cobbled together to create the version it's extremely likely you will have, at some point in your life, heard or sung:
This is one of those stories in which a traditional song is deracinated and mutated into something recognizable but quite different (think every blues cover Led Zeppelin ever recorded). Almost invariably, the question of songwriting credit and, more importantly, royalties come into play.
It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with this old sad song that Solomon Linda made, roughly, bupkis on this tune ever. But it's an interesting story nonetheless.
I'd recommend reading about it in Joe Boyd's And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, a magisterial overview of the development of what is now called "world music."
In the interim, here's "In the Jungle: Inside the Long, Hidden Genealogy of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’," a 2000 long-form article by South African writer Rian Malan, from Rolling Stone, that delves into this particular question.
